A Letter to Santa, and his Boss . . .

Dear Santa,

I know you represent all that is wonderful about Christmas, a spirit of goodness where people treat each other with love and fairness, a spirit of jolly friendship to every girl and boy, and most of all, a spirit of giving to reflect the gift of Jesus.

Dear Santa,

I don’t want to “have-to” this year.

Can you make shopping be without an eye to ‘what I want’, but with the philosophy that “The gift of Christ is so meaningful to me, I want to repeat that in the gift I am about to give . . .”

Can you block out the Capitalist Religion from the news, where the headlines will be full of stories about ‘how the stores are doing’ and ‘how much people are spending’, and fill the news with stories where people are helping people, where giving is the lead, not spending, where the Spirit of Christ governs, not the spirit of money?

Can you help keep our focus on Jesus and not have our energy sapped by politically correct debates of “Happy Holidays” versus “Merry Christmas”, or letting us get all upset with mocking terms like “Chrismahanukwanzakah”?

Can you dim the lights of the crazy consumer Christmas to let the inner light of Jesus shine forth?

Dear Santa,

I want to marvel at the baby. I want to be filled with the wonder that God loved us so much that He sent His Son to us as a baby. I want to be amazed to see Jesus in the manger. I want to smell the hay and see the animals in the stable where he was born. I want to see the angels singing to the shepherds, and worship with the shepherds at the manger. I want to see the star of Jesus and I want to follow it to see the King.

Dear Jesus,

I’ve been writing a letter to your Christmas guy. Now I pray, please make this letter come true.

Love, Your annoying henchman

The Walking Dead

I can't help myself watching this show. The vampire shows out there annoy me but the zombies appeal to me. I am definitely a fan of slow zombies. The shambling creatures, gathering in numbers, slowly pushing you to where you can't go no more, that scares me. The fast, overrunning zombies, a la "28 days", it messes with the myth.

I think the appeal of the show is similar to what makes "Jaws" so scary. It isn't the shark, its the water, the open, unassuming, wide expanse with death lurking just below the surface. Now, you can be in the city, you can be in the country, you can be anywhere, and you don't know when the next creature is going to show up. And the next step from Jaws is that this isn't a monster, this is us turned into a monster.

And then I ask myself the question, "Is this something you would show your youth group pastor?" The answer is no. But there are youth group members watching it. What am I prepared to say about that?

Question 1: Is it wrong to watch shows like that?

No. I think watching shows that romanticize drug use, encourage sexual promiscuity without responsibility, that demonstrate violence without recrimination is wrong. I think watching stuff that attempt to blunt the edge of our God-given conscience, that try to file down 'right and wrong' to some personal agenda of what "makes me feel good" is bad for the soul.

The Walking Dead is attempting to put real people into an impossible situation to see what would happen. It is a powerful attempt to look into our own souls. And it does a pretty good job.

Question 2: Would you preach on this stuff?

A qualified yes. Preaching is engaging the gospel and the culture to help people know the beauty of Jesus and the power of the Christian faith. If "the Walking Dead" is an active part of the culture I am preaching to, it is fair game. If it isn't, if it is an esoteric piece of the media landscape, then I'm not fairly engaging the popular culture of my congregation by referring to it, so I would only use it sparingly.

Question 3: Is there a gospel response to the premise of "The Walking Dead"?

I believe there is. I've talked about this before in movies where some 'evil' takes over the will and actions of the characters. I believe God's mercy is what we need to consider here. When we are responsible for our actions, our only recourse is to seek forgiveness in Jesus Christ, because we cannot choose not to sin. God, in God's mercy, will forgive us. When we are not responsible for our actions, I believe God's mercy gets cranked up. In the language of the show, God would forgive the actions of the zombies because they are no longer human beings.

But now the big questions: Is a zombie responsible for its actions? Are they in control of their choices? The question behind those needs to be: "Is God really in control?"

Sermon: Nov. 28, 2010 “Jesus Versus Capitalism?” 1 John 2:1-17

How many people got up before their normal work day schedule to go shopping on Friday? How many were seduced by the promises of insanely cheap prices if you were at the store by 6 or 5 or 4 or 3 am, or even earlier? Was it worth the time and trouble?

Welcome to the war for the heart and mind of Christmas. On the one side is the truth, that God sent his only son into the world that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. On the other side is the entire economic capitalist free market system at its most powerful telling us to buy, buy, buy, to make this holiday something really special. That’s what John calls the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches. I challenge anyone to tell me when you could buy enough to make Christmas truly special.

In this letter from the apostle John, it is all about a new commandment. It is about living unto God and not unto the world. It is about when we screw up, we have forgiveness. Jesus is our Advocate, Jesus is our Atoning Sacrifice, it doesn’t get any better than Jesus. But John knows the struggle between what is to be-a life obedient to Christ and what is-a life of sin and struggle in the current world. And Christmas may be the most obvious battlefield for that struggle.

Where we’ve messed things up, I believe, is where we’ve made Santa Claus the bad guy. I am talking about the church when I talk about “we”. There are many Christians who look to Santa as a secular symbol of all that has gone wrong with Christianity, commercialism, materialism, greed, a culture of more, more, more, that Santa is somehow responsible for displacing Jesus to a smaller and smaller corner of the Christmas landscape to make room for more and more toys.

I don’t buy that. We have a decoration on our Christmas tree at home. There is Santa, on his knees at the manger, worshipping Jesus. That’s the truth about Santa, I think. There is an origins story that appeals to me. The man who gives gifts every year to all the children of the world, he was there to bring gifts to the greatest gift the world has ever received. How about that for a Christmas miracle? One of the magi lives on, bringing gifts to the world every year to celebrate the greatest gift we’ve ever received? That’s a Christmas movie I would watch.
It’s not about Jesus versus Santa. There is no knock down, drag out fight about who owns Christmas. No, there is another enemy out there, an enemy to both Jesus and Santa. We know it as one of the seven deadly sins. If we are going to call it a demi-god, lets name it for what it is, Greed.

Greed is what turns an enjoyable time of letting a child’s imagination wander through the toy catalogues that come to the house into a nightmare of I want, I want, I want, I want. Come back to that phrase “the desire of the eyes”. If they can see it, they seem to want it. The children who you love and want to provide for become these media savvy consumers who can quote extensively from the commercials they see on television and online.

Greed is why the news reports at Christmas time are going to be about the numbers. How did the box stores do? How did the malls do? How did the online stores do? How much money did we wring out of the American population for the purposes of buying stuff? How well do we know that the vast majority of the stuff we buy is stuff we will never use or we don’t need?

You know what statistics I would like to hear? How much of the world’s population could receive clean drinking water with the money America spends for one Christmas Season. How many people could be fed? How much pollution could be cleaned up? How much global warming reversed? How much sustainable growth in a country that has not? Don’t want to go overseas? How many jobs could be provided for in this country with that money? Could we make unemployment go extinct?

I love it when people say that is not how the system works. That is not how the free market system works. That is not how a global capitalist system works. John calls that the “pride in riches”. What I want for Christmas is a different system.
I think that is why the season is so busy. That’s why it feels like riding a surf board down Mt. Everest. The proponents of Greed, the powers behind that power, those seeking to undercut the real feeling and knowledge of Christmas, the last thing they want is for us who love Jesus, we who are saved by the birth of Jesus, those of us who love this Season for all that it could and should represent, the last thing they want is for us to take a moment at the manger and say “Hey, here I am. Here is Jesus. Here is the Reason for the Season. Here is the reason I have received life eternal. Here is the reason why the rest of it is nonsense.”
If they gave us enough time to figure that out, we could chuck the junk and enjoy the wonder. But who has the time?

But consider what we have to stand against the corporate industrial capitalist retail empire that calls us forth to celebrate the season with the expenditure of the almighty dollar.

We have the story of a couple of homeless people.

Against all the glitz and glitter and lights and sound and smells and tastes that will bombard and overwhelm our senses during this holiday season, what do we have?
We have a baby, born among animals, whose first bed was where the animals eat.
Hundreds and thousands of voices are going to whisper and talk and scream into our ears about what we should be buying to make ourselves happy, about what to make our children happy, to make our pets happy, to make someone, somewhere, happy. Every one of those voices is going to be tinged by the evil one, trying to pull us off the true focus of our lives, off our relationship with Jesus Christ.

To that, I respond with the words of John. “Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live for ever.”

Merry Christmas. Let us pray . . .

Jesus: The Last Temptation . . .

He is a Cross Maker, not just a carpenter. Voices seize his mind and he falls down with those seizures, but it is God talking to him. Judas is his pal, sent to kill him for traitor behavior but who comes along to check out what is going on.

Granted, there is a disclaimer that this Jesus story is not from the gospel, but based on a novel. And Willem Dafoe is not as good as I remember him from the last time I watched the movie.

The theology of the movie denies the diety of Christ. He is a man chosen, forced by God to preach. It doesn't end well.

Back in the day, it was the condemnation of the movie by Christian leaders that gave the movie greater press and publicity than I think it deserves.

I don't know, I just can't spend a lot of time on this one.

Good Friday: The Musical

"Jesus Christ Superstar", the 1973 version, not the remake of 2000. That one might be worthy of its own consideration. Judas Iscariot is an understandable figure. Jesus the man is growing in his own ego. His preaching and teaching are going to challenge the political order. Those teachings will bring on the wrath of the Romans. He must be stopped.

Jesus, preacher, teacher, frowning as he considers where the trail he leads must end. He is wrestling with the reality that he is going to become a political liability. Two scenes about him strike me. One is when the infirmed and the ill gather around him, all in rags, more like a zombie scene out of "Night of the Living Dead", surrounding Jesus, pressing in on him, until he disappears beneath their weight. Not the Jesus the Bible teaches me about.

The second is the endpoint. They crucify him, he dies, thus endeth the trouble. Judas kills himself out of guilt, Pilate has washed his hands of the matter-he was rather wimpy for the Roman governor of a troublesome province, Caiphas can mark off one more political reason for the Romans to crack down. It is like the ending of Mark without the verses 'added later'. It stops at Good Friday, it stops at the death of Jesus, then a shot of an empty cross...just in case we Christians got it right.

Then Mary Magdalene, falling into the prostitute tradition. She is not someone the 'movement' should be associated with according to Judas, bad PR. The girlfriend of, the lover of, comforter of Jesus, a foreshadowing of the married Jesus Dan Brown touts in The Da Vinci Code.

Then the disciples, bunch of dummies, "What's the buzz, tell me what's a happening..."

And yet I liked it. The music I grew up with-one of the few albums not classical in the house. It was a phenomenon in the Philippines, where I was living when it was released. Then again, every Good Friday is a phenomenon in the Philippines. It was like how I enjoyed the Da Vinci Code, a nice piece of fiction, divorced from my Lord of the Scriptures.

And they played it like that. At the opening, the bus pulls up, the actors and crew pile out, at the end, they strike the set and leave. It was just a story, not the Truth, not the witness, not the gospel.

Movies about Holy Week: Easter as Epic

"The Greatest Story Ever Told" is representative of the epic bible movie. Charlton Heston seems to show up in every one, in this as John the Baptist-looking more like a wrestling star. We are looking at movies that depict the crucifixion of Jesus throughout this Lenten Season, asking several questions along the way.

First, how do these movies stack up against the biblical witness? Deriving from that, how does Hollywood, and by extension the culture surrounding it, consider the Easter message? Finally, we hope to look at where our faith may have been unduly influenced by the culture, and reground it in Scripture.

The Epic is the Big Show. Much of Scripture is used, the quotes tend to be generally accurate, there is a sense of grandeur to it all. The American Southwest is bigger and more majestic in scale than the Holy Land, adding to the bigness of the entire plot.

Stacked against the biblical witness, "The Greatest Story Ever Told" does pretty well, all things considered. Not too much is created out of nothing, there is not excessive character development-turning Judas into something Scripture does not give a foundation for. John the Baptist was a little more tough guy, but it is Charlton Heston.

It was released in 1965, during what might be called the "epic" period of the church. I think we were past the Golden Age of the 1950's. I think the death of JFK ended that Golden Age. While the death of Martin Luther King Jr. was several years in the future, and Woodstock after that, the movie was released barely a week before the assassination of Malcolm X. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing, President Johnson began full scale bombing of North Vietnam, we were in a dangerous time.

"The Greatest Story Ever Told" was from the end of the Golden Age, in the midst of new struggles that hadn't yet plunged America into deep crisis. The story of Jesus was still powerful-if overblown-in the minds and hearts of the popular culture.

What is a blessing?

What is a blessing?

Parents have the unenviable task of shaping the lives of their children. It is a fine line to walk between equipping them with the tools they need to live effective, efficient, energetic, and rewarding lives and imposing on them our own unfulfilled needs, hopes, and dreams. We want them to be the best they can be. But they have to depend on us to get there.

God has the unenviable task of shaping the lives of His children. Thus far, only his oldest boy, a fine young man named Jesus, has met the challenge. The difference between God and earthly parents is that the will of God, what we might understand as hopes and dreams of the Christian faith, are what we need to live effective, efficient, energetic, and rewarding lives.

Without Jesus, left to our own devices, we are hellbound for destruction, carrying the weight of just punishment for our sins. Thank you Lord that we are with Jesus. Grace, love, mercy, forgiveness, these are the blessings we receive to shape our lives more fully into the life God wants us to lead.

That life is to glorify God. Salvation did not come as a nice thing to do for us humans, it came as a means for us to live out that work we have, glorifying the Almighty. I remember a theological discussion talking about how we are hard wired for that glory. We will worship, it is in our spiritual (and maybe physical DNA). If not God, then something else.

Which leads to my concern with Prosperity Theology. A business analyist at the beginning of our depression (not great thankfully) spoke of 'consumer confidence' as being the key indicator of economic health. Put another way, that is faith in the economic system-not faith in God or Christ, but in the economic system, the free market system, capitalism. And in this system, our worship is not measured by the sounds of our voices lifted in praise to God, but in the acquisition of the currency of the free market system, money.

The richest nation in the world has a terrible problem with money. It has replaced God as the means to our survival. Much Christian religious practice has re-developed itself around the almighty dollar, needing it, promoting it, seeking it, all in God's name of course, to provide a veneer of divine respectability.

Maybe poverty is a real blessing for us, stripping away that which replaces God and forcing us to acknowledge our dependance in real terms, not just the comfortable venacular of a Sunday worship service. Maybe pain and misery are blessings to us, make us identify with those for whom pain and misery is the lot of life. To be homeless is to understand their plight?

Unlike cigarettes or alcohol, our dependance on money cannot be cut off cold turkey. Such is the problem with food addictions, you have to eat. But maybe God is blessing us with hard times to remind us that He is in control. Maybe God is blessing us who have with those who have not so that we can exit the self-centered world of our own delight, and truly reach out as a sister or brother in the world.

What is a blessing? Who gets to name it?

Give to get Given To?

Stewardship as a part of discipleship, it makes sense. Coming to church, reading Scripture, personal time of devotion, giving to the church, part of the Christian experience. But I get uncomfortable with the proclamation of tithing. Tithing is Scriptural, it is where I believe stewardship should aim, but . . . and this but is significant.

But, a number of discussions of tithing present with preaching that if we give and give generously to the church, we will in turn be blessed by God. There is a very fine line there. Yes, I believe that the Lord cares for His people. Yes, I believe that the Lord will help tithers 'figure out' their budgets. But to promise blessings in return for giving? The implication for me is financial blessings. That walks very close to, if not over the line of 'prosperity theology'.

Prosperity theology, as I understand it, is a promise that if you love and obey God, your divine reward will be financial prosperity, will be material satisfaction. The two go hand in hand to 'measure our faith'.

I am listening to church growth and leadership resources, looking for ways and means to grow church. These resources have come to the line of promising God's blessings for giving . . . and then what? When does an assurance of God's blessing become a promise of prosperity in return for faith? When do we depend on the Lord to help us support our church and when does it become a form of works righteousness? We work for God so God blesses us?

I struggle with that one.