Hello Friends,
As your time wanes into the holiday rush, I want to thank you for welcoming me into your inbox and earballs and, through your feedback and questions, making this a thoughtful community.
And in the spirit of the season, don’t forget to:
Seriously, if you’re a Christian whose sphincter gets tight at the mention of the word evangelism, then go the easy introvert’s route and:
Merry Christmas to all of you!
My gift to you is this conversation with Fleming Rutledge.
Here is her prayer at the end:
Lord,
We are no longer slaves, but free. Free in our knowledge of the future of your son and his kingdom. Make us citizens of that kingdom, Lord.
Take hold of us in our darkness, in our fear, in our culpability, our mutual culpability. Take hold of us, Lord.
Turn our face to the light, the light that comes at the end of all time and all that is, to remake your entire creation into a new order, a new order of love, grace, mercy, transformation and eternal citizenship in your presence.
Lord, make the city of God so real to us that we can slog through our days with what Christians call hope. The hope that is beyond hope, the hope that places all its resources in the promises that you have made to us in your beloved son.
Grant, Lord, that we may not fear to look at the darkness and take an inventory of it and say to ourselves, this Lord is what you came to conquer and banish forever.
And so in this time between, this time between the first coming of our Lord Jesus in humility and his second coming in majesty and glory, let us live in this present time according to our citizenship in that future time, our merits, but placing ourselves entirely in your hands as recipients of the grace which has no conditions whatsoever, except your eternal love. In the name and in the power of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.
Here is the rough transcript:
I don't think anyone was prepared for it to be so popular. I sold out, as you probably know, and had to be reordered, and that took a while. I feel a little sad that Advent is coming to an end, not only because I love it so much, but also because the book sales will plummet until next Advent, God willing. I do think it's interesting, very interesting, because it's not, these are not easy themes. This is not a likeability book.
doesn't rank high on the likeability chart. It's challenging. And I am very happy and pleased that so many people seem to have found it helpful, interesting, provocative, whatever, a lot of people, but not as many Episcopalians as I would have liked. In fact, I'm more than a little discouraged. I was in Boston just a week ago and...the great Trinity Church Copley Square had Christmas wreaths with red bows on the front. And that made me sad. It really did because we just didn't use to do that. The Episcopal Church is falling prey to the culture just like everything else. Just can't resist, can't resist the pressure of the commercial culture. And I do think that's a pity. It's not all that easy to persuade people that in the end, in the last analysis, focusing on the darkness is healthy, truthful, strengthening, and ultimately provides the right setting for the explosion of joy, the completely unexpected nature of the miracle of the incarnation. So I'm sad that even the Episcopal Church, which has been known for Advent observance, as long as I can remember, is in a lot of ways just giving up and going for the expectations of the multitudes. I think there's still some residual commitment to the Advent mood, but I don't think having an Advent wreath does it. I have an Advent wreath. I like to have an Advent wreath.
It means something to me, but it is a medieval, I mean, it is not a medieval custom. It's a 19th century custom like Christmas trees. So it doesn't have a very deep resonance in church history, liturgical history. I was at a funeral at Shiloh Baptist Church, DC, and I was surprised that they had a wreaths out. I'm surprised too. But that's also an example of how individual traditions are losing their particularity and I'm sad about that. It's hard now to find a second, third, fourth generation Presbyterian or Lutheran. I just saw a poll about that. The numbers of people who still practice in the tradition they were born into is shrinking all the time and I think we're losing something there. I think being an old school Presbyterian or Lutheran Methodist has a certain preciousness about it because each of these traditions has something to offer to the great church. I like for Catholics to be Catholics. I don't want to try to make them into Episcopalians. Or maybe I do, actually. Maybe I want to make the whole world into Episcopalians, but the Episcopalians are stuck…going to stop being Episcopalians, then it doesn't make any difference, what's the point? But Jason, I have something else on my mind. I picked up the New York Times a few minutes ago and saw this stunning headline on the front page. Russian election effort focused on influencing the African-American vote. What more can we expect our African-American population to endure?
They are the butt of everything. I have a wonderful new young friend, African American friend, whose name is Dante Stewart and he's called Stu, you know. And I had lunch with him recently and he spoke so poignantly about the difficulty of loving white people…committed to loving white people from the bottom souls of his feet. You can just see that in watching him operate in a restaurant full of white people. He's just full of joy and full of friendship and full of goodwill. But he says it's extremely costly to maintain that because of the daily, many times daily assumptions that people make. And above all, the lack of willingness of white people.
I to try to enter into and understand what black people go through. And then here's this insult that the Russians, for God's sake, the Russians, of course I don't mean the Russian people, I mean the Russian operatives, whoever they are, are cynically focusing on disenfranchising the African-American vote so as to get Donald Trump elected. Now, regardless of who they're trying to get elected,
It is just evil. And to do it on the backs of the descendants of slaves just seems to me to be the most particularly horrible piece of news to receive this morning. Now this is Advent. This is a piece of Advent news. This is the way it is in this world riddled with sin and under the thumb of the adversary. How would you give it from Advent?
And that story to preaching Christmas. Well, on Christmas day, you mean, or Christmas Eve, oh, that's a little side comment. I'm sorry that people don't still say Christmas Eve and Christmas day, because Christmas is 12 days. So when we say on Christmas, what we mean to say is on Christmas day. I love that in the Dickens Christmas Carol, when Scrooge sticks his...head out of the window says, what day is this? And the person in the street says, it's Christmas day. I love that. Anyway, I believe that Christmas preaching, Christmas time preaching, Christmas Eve preaching, Christmas day preaching, I don't think many people preach on Christmas day, do you? Mostly it's Christmas Eve, right? Well, I've often quoted my beloved mother who, when I was asking her about why we didn't decorate the tree until the last minute, she said, Christmas should come in a burst. And I have always thought that was a wonderful way to explain what Christmas is.
The good news of Christmas does not grow incrementally.
It comes as a call from heaven in the night, it tempers the lowest form of humanity.
People don't realize what horrible job being a shepherd was in those days and how only the most crude and uneducated and underprivileged people would be shepherds. And the fact that the message comes to shepherds is very important. God designed that. Glory to God in the highest. All of a sudden a sign from heaven in the dark, a star in the dark. You can't see a star in the daylight. So I think that it is just critical if we are to understand what God has done for us to immerse ourselves in what we have done to ourselves in sin and in death. It's not right for Christians to talk about joy and peace all the time during Advent, as if when Christmas is coming, as though it's something that we deserve, something that's just part of the atmosphere. It's not part of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is full of demonic forces. The scripture makes this very clear, the New Testament and the later parts of the Old Testament. I don't like to keep quoting the same things all the time, but I do, very much, I was very much struck years ago by Susan Sontag writing that after a certain age, no one has a right to innocence. What she meant was no one has a right to ignore the dark things in life and pretend as if all is well. And that theme has come up lately in my purview because I went to a, I went to speak at a diocesan conference in Texas
And there was a young man there, a professor from Rice University, a young black man named Alexander Byrd, B-Y-R-D. And he passed out copies of James Baldwin's letter to his nephew. And we all divided up into groups and talked about the letter. And the subject of the letter is the false innocence of white people. Actually, I don't think he says innocence. I think he says ignorance.
And his point is that white people have willed, we have willed ourselves to be ignorant of the struggle of the black community in our midst. We have trivialized what they go through. We have ignored it. We have paid no attention to it. We don't understand it. We don't try to understand it. And I've been doing my little best to plead about this over the years.
I don't really feel a whole lot of response. I don't think very many white Christians are making an effort. Some are, mostly in the so-called liberal churches. I don't like that term or that idea, but the overall picture of American white Christians is not encouraging in that regard. I think that we could make so much more effort and we could, above all, we could stop being ignorant, as Baldwin discusses, we could stop being ignorant of what it's like to endure slight after slight after slight all day every day. The sense that people are just taking you for granted and assuming that you are something that you're not. I just think that would be incredibly difficult and it would create so much anger. I don't know why black people aren't angrier than they are. Well, anyway, I'm here today to try to talk a little bit more about. Do you think that points out the danger and the danger for white Christians in particular to celebrate Christmas with such sentimentality? Well I think it's a component of understanding life in its depths and in its pain and in its insolubility from the human side.
People are always talking about making the world a better place. That's a cliche that we hear all the time. There's a scene in a very fine movie called A Most Wanted Man. It's the last film that Philip Seymour appeared in. He plays an under... What would you call it? He's an intelligence. He's a spy, basically, in Germany. He is trying to work with Robin Wright, who is a...totally corrupt American agent. And they're sitting at a table in a tavern and he asks her, why are we doing this? Why are we doing what we do? And she says with this utterly cynical air, to make the world a better place. And the film ends tragically, tragically. And I think for us to talk in this glib way that we do about trying to make the world a better place, ought to be brought into sermons and in order to make it clear, dear people out there who are listening, in order to make it clear that God has done something that we could not do. We could not make the world a better place. In the beginning of Facebook, people thought it was going to make the world a better place. One step forward, two steps back. I realized that people need to be encouraged. And I believe and I know and I'm committed to encouraging people, let's say Christians. Christians encourage each other as the episode of the Hebrews says, encourage one another in the works of the spirit. That's from relations, of course. Part of our role as Christians together in our body is to encourage each other to practice the works of the spirit. And one of the works of the spirit, I think,
Well, I know if I might say so, is to see the other person and not rush past the person, whether it's a black person on the street or whether it's your own family member, not rush past the person's suffering. I read something just a couple of days ago about how difficult it is to just stay with a person's suffering instead of trying to move on. Instead of trying to...make it all right or think of something happy, think of something positive. You can't talk to a depressed person like that. It's as though people think you can will yourself out of a clinical depression, just to give an example. There are dark forces at work in the world and we have the Holy Spirit's gifts to fight against those dark forces but it's not ever going to be easy. And we need a lot of help from one another in order to stick with the subject of suffering and darkness and national and international corruption and crime. McKinsey and Company is making it possible for the world to be more unethical. McKinsey and Company, the great firm that...was always admired so much and now we read that they are deeply enmeshed in corruption all over the world. That's an Advent story. That's the story of the fall of man, the fall of humanity, fallen away from God. And we couldn't help ourselves. That whole God who helps those who help themselves, that is rampant in the churches. I heard a CD of a speech given at a parish stewardship done by a very prominent and committed churchman. And he began the speech by saying, now we all know that God helps those who help themselves. Now that should not be allowed to be said in a church because it leads people in precisely the wrong direction. Paul says in Romans 5, while we were still helpless, Christ died for the ungodly. That is the gospel in a nutshell. And to corrupt it and reverse it by saying that God helps those who help themselves is really distressing to hear that from someone who is a churchman or church person. I had a Methodist pastor, I had posted one of your quotes from your Advent book. I got a lot of pushback, but one of the pastors told me, grace has conditions.
And I just, I don't even know how you engage a conversation like that when you just have the terms wrong. That's really something. That, well that, but you, Dorothy Martin, the psychoanalyst in New York who had a great deal of influence in the Mockingbird, among the Mockingbird people and other ministries in the church, she said once to me, we deeply despise God's grace. And that was a shocking thing to hear. It was strongly worded, obviously.
I think she's onto something very important. We resist God's grace wherever we see it because we want to believe that we have contributed something to it. And so we want to put conditions on it. Gosh, conditions on grace, that really blows my mind. That is the most startlingly uncomprehending blind comment that I can possibly think of.
It's hard when there's so many people in the church that are speaking a different language. Well, it's extremely hard. We just have to keep on keeping on. The pointing, always pointing away from ourselves, pointing to the Lord, pointing to those in Christian history who have gotten this message and who have spread it. This is the quote from your book that generated so much blowback. I'll read it.
Sermons that end with statements like we are called to be the hungry celebrate inclusivity seek justice and so on or self-defeating When sermons end that way here's feel defeated and powerless except of course the few who are already doing whatever it is Then and can then feel superior for that reason hortatory sermons are the least inclusive sermons. They are divisive sermons in the mode of promise in power Every hearer should feel a promise has been made to them by God unlike us
God keeps his promises. People didn't like that. Well, gosh, I start to stand by that. I do too. I don't really understand why people, I don't understand why people are not thrilled to hear that God's grace is utterly unconditional. I would think people would be thrilled to hear that. But the people who, I don't want to sound putting down the people I'm talking about. So I have to be very careful about that because I realize that all of us are trapped in some frame of mind or another. I'm trapped in certain frames of mind and I wish I were not. It causes me a great deal of distress and anxiety to be trapped in a certain frame of mind for my whole life. So I have to be sympathetic to people who have a different kind of entrapment.
But we don't have to encourage it. As preachers and teachers of the faith, we don't have to encourage this idea that unless people are told what they ought to do, they will somehow become worse. Making life into an anxious slog is not what the gospel is supposed to be. The gospel is empowerment. Imagine, for instance, working with a hoarder. You are the pastor of a woman who is a hoarder. And you go over and you help her clean up. And then within a month or so, it's back to the way it was before. Hoarding is notoriously difficult to treat. So you say, well, why don't you just...
These kinds of approaches always begin with, why don't you just, why don't you just get rid of the things you want and that you really need and get rid of the things you don't really need. And then you go back a month later and it's back to the same situation. I would like to have a dollar for every time a person has said to me about my procrastination and forgetfulness and absent-mindedness. Why don't you just make a list? What a brilliant suggestion.
Make a list. I have lists all over my house. I lose the list. Did they think I hadn't thought of that? To me, that's what an auditory sermon is, is like being told, just make a list. Just get out there and feed the hungry, get out there and, you know, eliminate racism, just do it. No, it's not that easy. Maybe it's easy for the person speaking. The person speaking maybe is not absent minded. The person speaking may not be a hoard or a procrastinator. So that person can take a lofty and superior stance over against the procrastinator and the hoarder and the drunkard and so on, because he or she is free from these things. But if you know that you're not free from these things except in God, then you don't take the superior position of being able to exhort other people. Now the kind of exhortation that works, I would say isn't really exhortation, but the kind that works is the sort of thing that Martin Luther King used to do. I guess in a way you could call that hortatory, I guess. But it really wasn't. He was channeling power in his great sermons. He wasn't exhorting people to go out and demonstrate. He was empowering people for the struggle. It's quite different from exhortation.
You know, that's really something that person who said grace is conditional. That I think I'll probably will quote that for the rest of my life as an example of what we've gotten ourselves into as the church. What would you say to Christians and pastors who want to push back on what they would perceive as a dualistic worldview that your apocalyptic perspective brings?
Well, it's not dualistic in the true sense of the term dualism. Zoroastrianism was a true dualism. Christianity is not a true dualism because the two powers are not equal. The struggle that goes on between the people of God and the powers of evil is not an equal struggle. It certainly seems to be. Sometimes it seems to be equal in the sense that the demonic powers are stronger.
But they're certainly stronger than we are, but they're not stronger than God. And to people who question this, we just pointed to the New Testament. Jesus came exorcising demons. That's one of the things he did. One of the most important things that he did. Always talking about how Jesus came to heal the sick and raise the lowly and minister to the lost.
I don't mean that to sound sarcastic, I'm sorry. A different tone of voice. Jesus came to heal the sick. He came to seek the lost. He came to raise up those who have fallen. All of this is central to his ministry, but Jesus also came to drive out Satan, and he did exorcisms. And the New Testament is permeated with language about the adversary the evil one, Satan, the devil, the Elzebub, the prince of the power of the El, the ruler of this world. Even Christmas carols, as far as the curse is found, what would it, God rest you, Mary Edelman. Oh, it's all, I've made a study of that and I made a long list, I think it's probably in the Advent book, where I went through all the collection of hymns that I have, which is vast. And the references to death and sin and darkness and evil and Satan and so forth are manifold throughout the history of Christmas carol writing until the 19th century comes to an abrupt end and does not recover. It's really interesting to listen to the medieval carols and their words.
I think it's probably 18th or 19th century, sounds like it, but it does say that Jesus has come to rescue us from Satan's power. When we were going astray. That's the gospel. You really can't talk about the gospel in biblical terms unless you talk about Satan, about evil, about the demonic powers. But not evil is something out there. Has nothing to do with me personally because I'm such a good person.
Evil is insidious. It's out there and it's in here. Oath. And we all must struggle with it all day, every day of our lives. And anyone who thinks that he or she doesn't have to struggle every day against the power of the evil one is sadly mistaken and placing his or her power somehow, however subtly in his or her own capacity to overcome the powers of sin and death. The whole message of everything Paul ever wrote is that we cannot do it by ourselves. Something has to be undertaken from outside this mortal sphere, and that is what God has done. God has undertaken to invade the occupied territory with His annihilating power except that the annihilating power does not annihilate. It only annihilates the demonic powers. It does not annihilate the victims of the demonic powers, that is to say you and me. But the idea that there is some good place inside of us that we can reach if only we can dig down deep enough, this idea of going inside to find the kingdom of God is a very serious misreading the New Testament. There isn't any place, there is no component of the human being that has not been tainted by the reign of sin and death. That's the original meaning and the best meaning of Calvin's much misunderstood idea of total depravity. It doesn't mean that we're totally depraved in the way that we would understand that phrase. What it means is that we cannot expect to find some pure and uncontaminated part of ourselves which we can then nurture and bring into being in order to overcome the forces that are set against our flourishing. That's not the way it happens. Although so many people think it is, it's just rampant in the atmosphere of people believing that there is some preserved inner core of ourselves that if it can only be reached, that can be our salvation. The gospel is that we were dead in our sins, but God, who is rich in mercy, has sent his Son Jesus Christ to deliver us from this dominion of darkness confuses in the gospel as a message about what God has done versus defining that preaching the gospel as saying the things that Jesus said? Well, yes, I think you understand well enough the way I think that you can say things that I would say sometimes better than I would say them. Yes, I do harp on this quite a lot that sermons like the Bible are based in what God has done. The story of the Bible is the story of what God has done, who God is and what God has done. It's not a story about human potential. It's not a story about human possibility. With men it is impossible, but all things are possible with God, said the son of God. I think that might be quoted a lot more often than it is quoted, because we really want to believe in possibility.
Jesus flat out declares it impossible. With humans it is impossible, but all things are possible with God. Maybe we should make that verse central to our preaching. Just a thought. Yeah, I love talking to you, Jason, because we do seem to think similarly about these matters. I really try to be patient and understanding when people talk about how important it is to emphasize what we should be doing. When I try to do that in my preaching and teaching, I try to give examples of what we can do. I think that is more helpful in the long run than telling people what they should do. Give examples of what other people have done. There are so many stories in just the daily news. And I don't think you get this so much on television, although some, you have the CNN heroes, those are good examples. Although some of those people seem beyond my can. I can't imagine being as energetic in well-doing as they are. I admire it tremendously. But it has also often been said that it takes a saint to live with a saint. And I just think holding up saints to be examples is not very productive. Saints in quotation marks, because of course, speaking from the point of view of the New Testament, we're all saints and sinners at the same time. Simul pe car to'a eustis. And that's very comforting, I think. Forever holding up people like St. Francis and St. Teresa and Mother Teresa I meant, Saint Teresa too. Holding them up as examples that we're supposed to emulate is not helpful in my opinion. They had their struggles too and that should be, and Saint Francis is not just somebody who went around preaching to birds. There's a lot more to him than that. He's been sent a mental think, oh, St. Francis, isn't he wonderful? Who's going to be like St. Francis? Who's going to give up every single thing and embrace poverty? It's just not realistic. I think it's important in preaching to give accessible examples, little things that anyone can do so as to help people understand that the little things they do can be enormously important.
I think that's much more effective than exhorting people. Because to give an illustration, specific and concrete illustration, like the illustration I love about the people who went and put menorahs in their window after their neighbor's menorah was destroyed, something like that, just a little thing. But it had to took some energy and some imagination to get those menorahs in the windows the next day as a protest against anti-Semitism.
It's not as if we all have to suddenly give up and give up our livelihoods and our families and go overseas to address anti-Semitism. So what are you hoping for this Christmas? You mean me personally or? Both. Well, every year I just hope, you know, I hope the same thing everybody hopes for Christmas. I hope we get through it and I hope we get through it without fights.
That's what I hope. And probably my husband and I were sitting at the dinner table last night praying that we could get through Christmas without any fights, family fights. It's just Christmas tends to be disappointing. Invest it with non-theological significance. I mean, that's kind of an Advent theme too, though, that our expectations for Christmas never quite measure up. Our expectations are poorly conceived.
They're not, they're conceived with a distorted and sentimental view of human nature. The same could be said for how we enter marriage. Oh, indeed. Oh my goodness. So, oh Lord, that is a perfect example of the way we walk into things with rosy spectacles on and expect things to stay that way. It's really, we really are pitiful creatures.
And we do it over and over and over and over and over. But Advent is training. It is a training ground for the church in which the church disciplines itself to look at the darkness and identify inside oneself and outside oneself, to look at the news or read the paper. Who reads the paper today? Only people over 80, I think.
But I think it's very important to read newspapers and to read analytical articles about what's going on instead of just getting it on cable television. It's so important to step away from cable television and read something more in depth. That's where you get a sense of the intractability of sin and death in the world. And you are summoned to focus intellectually and emotionally on the terrible mess that we're in the world. Everywhere you look. The New York Times also has inserted into its pages a section, let me see if I can find it. No, it's only once a week. It's good news of the week. And it's practically obvious that they're concerned about the fact that there's nothing but bad news. So they have good news of the week and they list 10 things and they amount to things like this baby elephant born or something equally trivial. I mean, it really is kind of pathetic. They can't seem to think of anything that's really good to talk about. And it's sort of pathetic that they have to have a special section of good news to counteract an entire newspaper for sections of bad news. I do think, here's an example that I would celebrate. The Nobel Peace Prize this year went to a group of women who have worked hard to declare, I'm not quite clear about the details, but they have worked hard to raise the definition of rape, especially in war, rape is a weapon of war. They have worked hard to bring attention to this. And just by paying attention to this, we can participate in their work just by even mentioning the fact. A lot of people probably don't realize that these women have won the Nobel Peace Prize. We can participate in some small way just by paying attention to that, to what they're doing. Acknowledging it, taking an interest in it, doesn't mean we have to go out and become rape counselors, but the fact that they have taken up arms, figuratively speaking against this terrible weapon of war is encouraging. That's an example of something that's encouraging as long as it's not cast into, in the terms of you should do exactly what they're doing. No, we can not do what exactly what they're doing, but we can do small things. And by the way, when I just said we can do small things, I think that's not the same thing as exhortation. That's more of a declarative statement, an indicative statement as opposed to an imperative.
That's helpful. Well, I hope so because it's really a problem for preachers and it's a problem for biblical interpretation and for the church in general. There's such a gulf in the church. I just find it almost unbearable to see how far apart we are and how people of goodwill have misunderstood each other and had contempt for one another and written one another off, really.
It's just, it's grievous, it's heartbreaking to see the church, to see that it happened like this. It wasn't so obvious in the past as it is now with the prosperity gospel reigning over so much of what we call Christchurch. And with the liberal churches, what shall I say, the churches that are so committed.
I'm deeply committed to social justice. I write about it and talk about it all and read about it all the time. But it's not in and of itself the gospel. And many of the mainline churches have made it the gospel. And they talk all the time about being inclusive, but they're not including me. Even though I have worked very hard to make social justice prominent in my preaching and teaching, that's not good enough for the...typical mainline church. You have to do it more, or you have to do it in a different way, or you have to include every conceivable issue and have a position of political correctness on every single issue. It's very discouraging. We're not trying to understand each other. Well, this is an Advent situation. So we go into Christmas damaged. We go into Christmas, as C.S. Lewis said, bent. We go into Christmas...as broken, sinful, outrageously sinful people who have contempt for one another. And we put other people into niches and boxes and prisons and places where we think they belong because we are so high-minded. It's just endemic in human nature to be like that. We should go into Christmas understanding that and then we see what God has done.
When Jesus was born, he was born into Adam, as Paul says. He was born as the second Adam to participate in Adam's servitude and Adam's bondage and Adam's utter desolation and inability to help himself. And of course, I'm speaking of Adam metaphorically, Adam and Eve, they are us, they are us.
And Jesus takes on our lives, the second Adam, and lives it from beginning to end as God, the right way, as the one whom God created to be an image of himself. Jesus taking the entire race of Adam into himself and offering it up to Satan and emerging victorious. As a Christmas hymn, I can't remember how to quote it about Christ taking on Adam's helpless race, that's us. God helps those who help themselves, no. He took on Adam's helpless race. That's exactly what Christmas is. And if we think of ourselves as making the world a better place to live, then we don't need Christmas. We can just have commercial Christmas. That's a good place to end. I've been told that when you don't pray at the end of our episodes, people feel cheated. So if you could pray:
O God, our Heavenly Father, we come before you in this latter part of the Advent season, knowing ourselves to be enslaved by sin and by the powers of death. Accept, accept, O Lord, for the great but. We were enslaved by sin and death. But now.
We are no longer slaves, but free. Free in our knowledge of the future of your son and his kingdom. Make us citizens of that kingdom, Lord. Take hold of us in our darkness, in our fear, in our culpability, our mutual culpability. Take hold of us, Lord. Turn our face to the light, the light that comes at the end of all time and all that is, to remake your entire creation into a new order, a new order of love, grace, mercy, transformation and eternal citizenship in your presence. Lord, make the city of God so real to us that we can slog through our days with what Christians call hope. The hope that is beyond hope, the hope that places all its resources in the promises that you have made to us in your beloved son. Grant, Lord, that we may not fear to look at the darkness and take an inventory of it and say to ourselves, this Lord is what you came to conquer and banish forever. And so in this time between, this time between the first coming of our Lord Jesus in humility and his second coming in majesty and glory, let us live in this present time according to our citizenship in that future time, our merits, but placing ourselves entirely in your hands as recipients of the grace which has no conditions whatsoever, except your eternal love. In the name and in the power of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.
Christmas Should Come in a Burst