All about you.

There's a good chance that if I reference a Nintendo Wii game here on this blog, none of you will have played it.  But that's okay, I'm gonna reference it anyway.  The game in question is called 'rhythm heaven fever,' and it's a game that's subdivided down into a whole bunch of, as you may guess, rhythm based minigames.  You have to either press A, B, or A and B together in time with the beat of the song to pass the level. I know, it doesn't sound too engrossing, but after a short while of playing it, you can get quite into it.  And I should know, having played it many times before.

There's one minigame in question that is not only strangely compelling, but is also eminently quoteable, and that's the game called 'love rap.'

As you can expect, you have to press the A button when the time is right to continue.  And the lyrics are quoteable, but they're also completely insipid.  Crazy into you, fo sho, all about you, etc.

It's the lyric 'all about you' that stuck in my head though.  All about you.  It's a fairly frequent criticism of contemporary Christian music that you could change all the instances of Jesus in the song to 'Baby,' and it could be a pop song, and probably not a bad one. That was a subject of one of the better episodes of South Park, where the guys started a Christian rock group, and were able to satirize all aspects of contemporary Christian music.  But the lyric of 'all about you' is pretty much our attitude when it comes not just to contemporary Christian music, but also to Christianity.  We get to thinking that most everything is all about us, that we are the most important thing in the universe, and that God's most important job is to do what we want him to do.  He should be doing what we want him to do, loving those whom we love, and hating whom we hate.  God almighty should be working on what we want him to work on, and paying attention to what we want him to pay attention to.

But here's the thing that happens, which is that we end up oddly focused ourselves, and less focused on what God wants, and what he's all about.  And the story of Jonah is one of the best ones for understanding that.  For Jonah was one of the absolute worst prophets of all time, not only bad at delivering his message, but bad at not wanting to give it in the first place.  From the very beginning of his story, Jonah has been told to get to Nineveh, and to counsel the Ninevites to turn back from their sin.  But Jonah has no urge to do that.  He has no motive to counsel the Ninevites to turn back from their sin, mainly because of the possibility that if he preached the message well, they might actually listen.  And Jonah wasn't exactly keen on the Ninevites.  Not keen at all. He wanted them to be struck down by God, destroying them in their sin.  And the possibility of the message being adhered to, listened to, and acted on, was too much for Jonah to bear.  He wanted God to destroy the city, and burn its inhabitants.  So when he delivered the message in the worst way possible, sadly for him, the people listened, and turned away from their sin.  And Jonah was devastated.

You see, the majority of us get fixated on what we want out of things, and turn a blind eye to what God may have in mind.  He may want to rescue our enemies, because he desires that all men should be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.  But we have a nasty habit of inserting ourselves perhaps too much into the situation, making sure that it is our will that is done, instead of God's will.  We want to be certain that our needs are met, and that God will pay attention to our likes and dislikes over and above everything else.

The reading from first Corinthians that we had for today talked about that.  It talked about how there is a real temptation that we all have to let the day to day fabric of our lives obscure God and his needs and desires.  Paul cautions us that if we're married, that we ought to live as though we weren't.  If we have dealings with the world, we ought to act as though we didn't, if we have posessions, to act as though we didn't.  Why, one might ask.  Well, because these things have a nasty habit of getting

in the way, of obsuring God and his will, of forcing themselves into our lives, throttling us with the day to day of just being alive.  And lest you think this is a new problem, this was happening even in the time of Jesus, where he asked people to follow him, and their answers were all 'I will, just as soon as I find time.  Let me bury my father, let me finish my land purchase, let me take care of what I have to take care of, then I'll get to you.' The day to day stuff of life has a way of getting in the way, to the point that seeing what God has in mind can easily get strangled away.

So Paul cautions us to not let this stuff get in the way.  He cautions us because he knows how easy it is to have wedges driven between us and God.  He knows how distracted we are by the day to day, he knows how things creep into our mind, how fickle we are.  And he knows that if we're focused on our day to day, if that falls away through age, or death, or anything like that, then we will lose God as well.  If our love for God depends on how well things are going, when those things are stripped away, what is left.

We are notoriously short sighted to the bigger picture, and if was left to us, we would be forever separated from God.  If God waited for us to find him, for us to give our hearts to him, for us to chose to love him over and above all things, he'd still be waiting.  We need to know that it's not up to us, that it's not all about us, it's not about how well we do at finding God, at seeking him out.  If you look at the Gospel reading for this last Sunday, you would have seen that Jesus walked out to the beach to call his disciples where they were.  He knew their focus was going to be on the day to day business of home, work, family and daily life, so that's where he found them.  But more than that, he knew that even after calling them, their concerns for hearth and home, for life and limb, were going to persist.

And that's why Jesus went to the cross.  For his followers who would be tempted to flee to save themselves, for people who would not do a good job of following through with their commitments, for people who could have God as their highest priority, yet did not .  As it says in the reading from First Corinthians, we ought to live as though we didn't have any of these encumberances.  But we do have these encumberances.  There are things that get in the way, we know that.  And God knows that too.  That's what Jesus is for.  He's there to live without these encumberances, all the things that get in the way between him and us.  He is there to bridge that gap, not us.  He knows we're going to be frail, and so he does the work that needs to be done, to bridge the gap, to find us, to claim us as his own.  This is what Jesus is all about - loving us, seeking us, bringing us back because it's not all about us.

It's all about him.

Getting calls, being silent

Information these days moves at exactly whatever speed we want it to.  If you want blazing fast information, it will be at your fingertips in seconds. If you want to read a newspaper, or savor a novel, you can do that too.  But it's not just that information moves faster these days, but rather that it is all the more invasive. We are persistently engaged constantly, even when we'd rather not be.  Our attention is pulled in a thousand ways every moment of every day.  You always have something

beeping demanding your attention.  There is a hefty amount of intrustion into our lives, and we can't seem to shake it.  And the sad thing is, that we invite it in.  We welcome all this intrusion, heck, we cause it.  Every beep that happens is because at some point, we consciously invited it in. And what does this all do to us and for us?  Well, to make a long story short, it erodes and corrodes our ability to concentrate on and process this information. In a world of essentially ceaseless noise, of distractions in every which way, even though we have access to all the world's information, it comes in a miasma of distractions, always.

And that leads us to the calls that God gives in the Bible.  For on Sunday, we got to look in on the call that God gave to Samuel, whom the Bible tells us, did not know God at that time.  And when Samuel hears the call of God, he doesn't know who it is who is calling him, and so he goes and asks of Eli why he was calling him.  Eli responds by saying that he had not called Samuel, and that Samuel ought to go back and lie down.

Samuel does, but the calls just keep on coming.  So eventually, Eli clues into the fact that it's God calling Samuel and not Eli himself, so he  tells Samuel to go back, lie down, and when he hears that voice again, to respond by saying 'speak Lord, your servant is listening.'

Your servant is listening.  That's good for Samuel, but how is it for us?  Are we listening?  We probably aren't.  Psalm 46 has a very famous line in it that says 'be still, and know that I am God,' which is a wonderful saying, but it is something that we get less and less good at over time.  As time drags on, we tend to fill the space up rather than allowing it to empty out.  Silence is something that we feel needs to be eliminated at all times.  As soon as something is quiet, we rush to fill that void with sound and pictures.  Silence is an enemy to be defeated at all costs.  We don't want dead space, we don't want dead air.

Do we take any time to be still, and know that God is God? Do we take any time to know who God is and what he is all about?  Do we take time to listen?  Usually not.  More often than not, we proceed as though we knew what God had already said on the subject, and we're usually wrong.  I know it's a tired trope, but you know of the stories of national and international conflicts, in which both sides feel as though God is on their sides, that he would back them up and support them 100%, and they want that to be true.  And we all say that God couldn't possibly support them both, right?

We all know that, and yet we continue to fight with those who are around us, and sincerely believe that God is on our side, while the other person believes likewise about themselves.  We all believe that God would and does support us and back us 100% in our struggles, in our endeavors, without stopping to consider the alternative. What if he doesn't?  What if God doesn't support us, what if he might, in fact, disagree with what we're doing?

Be still, and know that I am God.  Take the time to listen.  It's funny, really, because what tends to set the great heroes of the scriptures apart is their ability to listen to what is said, and to react accordingly.  They aren't better people than anyone else, they aren't smarter or stronger or holier or anything like that, instead, they listen, in a way that most of us don't.

Be still, and know that I am God.  What does that mean? It means let God speak, and

hear what he has to say.  Don't skim the scriptures, engage with them.  Let God's word disagree with you, because it will.  If you read through the entire scriptures, and never find yourself disagreeing with it once, then either our Lord has returned and is reading this blog (unlikely), or you aren't letting God speak.  You're speaking for him.  Let him speak.  Let his word be spoken and heard, and take it for what it is. Don't try to drown it out, don't try to pretend he doesn't say what he says, take it for what it is, engage with it, and deal with it as it is. Yes, you won't like it, but here's where Grace comes in.

For you see, as Christians, you have to let God speak, and  hear him for what he says.  But he doesn't just speak words of Law, he speaks words of Gospel, too.  He speaks forgiveness, life and salvation.  And that's the core of what we as Christians need to deal with.  For we're not going to like a lot of what we hear from Jesus.  We aren't going to like or appreciate much of what we hear from the Scriptures, and the question is do we rush to fill that space up with sound, or do we let it be heard.  I know it's our temptation to plug our ears, or to pretend that God didn't say what he plainly says, or to feel as though God could not possibly say what he has already put out there. We want to believe that God doesn't diagree with us, and when he does, we seek to shut him out. But that's not what God is all about. Be still, and know that I am God.  Let him speak his words of law, and where they convict you, repent of them.  Repent, and turn your mind to other things.  Turn your mind to the grace that he offers at the cross.

Knowing your inability to follow the law, knowing your inability to do what God's word says you ought to do, your only choice would be to either toss the law out, or to pretend it's not there, or to try to move on past that and imagine that it doesn't apply, but it does apply.  The law applies to you. The stuff you'd rather not deal with because you're in conflict with it, that applies to you.  The whole thing applies to you.  The only question is, what do you do with the parts you don't like? You don't have to toss them out, but you do have to rely on God's grace.  Be still, and know that God is God.  Let his law speak, and let his Gospel speak too.  Let his words of disagreement with you be heard, but let his words of forgiveness and grace be heard too.  It is only this that gives us any confidence in the face of law that we dislike and disagree with.  It's only this that lets us hear the law without rejecting it, knowing that we are far short of it.  God's law is good, we are bad at keeping it.  That's why Jesus fulfills it.  IF you're still, if you listen, you'll hear all of that.  It's a matter being still, and knowing that God is God.

The cat in the hat came back

I'm not sure if you've read the sequel to the Cat in the Hat, or even if you knew that there was one. But there is, obviously, or I wouldn't be talking about it.  It's the same

story as it was back in the first book, where the nice family who are at the centre of it all have their mother go out for shopping, and the kids are left at home, ostensibly under the supervision of the very capable goldfish.  And then, at the absolute zenith of boredom, the cat in the hat shows up, and deigns to make things just a shade more interesting.  And so he does, this time by eating a cake in the bathtub, living the Canadian dream.  But the cat is scolded, and told to get packing, and so he hops out of the bathtub, pulling the plug, to reveal a pink ring in the tub.  Disaster.

So the rest of the book is an effort to get rid of the pink ring, and an exploration of the age-old wisdom that you can't make something clean without making something else dirty. So, the cat gets clean, obviously, but the tub gets dirty.  So then the cat cleans the tub with mother's new dress.  That makes the tub clean, but makes the dress pink.  And then he uses the drapes to clean the dress which, you guessed it, cleans the dress, but mucks up the drapes.  And the story goes on and on from there, spiralling out of control, further and further down, and as things get clean, other things get dirty.  Out of control, deeper and down.

Now, this story serves as a bit of an illustration for us, particularly when it comes to baptism.  Baptism is something that we as Lutherans hold pretty dear, where we hold fast to the work that God does to wash our sins away.  But that old maxim still holds, you know.  You can't make something clean without making something else dirty.  It's not possible to do that.  And the cat shows that, by washing things away, and yet not being able to get the dirt all the way gone.  The cat had some filth on him, and that filth was washed off of him and onto the tub, then the dirt was removed from the tub to the dress, then the dress to the drapes, then the drapes to the loafers and so on.

But we forget that when it comes to our sins.  We think that our sins, essentially, have no residue.  They don't really exist, they're not a real thing. We commit sins, we shrug

our shoulders, and what we ask God to do is to forget them.  To shrug his shoulders, to say 'oh well,' basically, and to pretend that it didn't happen.  And so what we're asking is for our sins to evaporate, to disappear, and to be as though they never happened.  But all that view of things does, is to give us the notion that our sins really don't count for anything at all.  They're not a major issue, they don't affect anything, and can be easily forgotten.  But that's not how things actually are.  They don't really work like that.

Your sins are like that grime that clung to the cat in the hat, and then to the tub.  Washed away, but then what.  Are they gone, or do they stick around, somewhere else.  And this is where forgiveness and the story of the baptism of Jesus meet head on.

If you're going to understand Jesus in the way that John the Baptist did, as the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, then you'll have to understand what it means to take away those sins.  If Jesus is to take away the sins of the world, then where do they go, because they're a lot like that pink ring in the tub; you're going to have to actually get rid of them somehow.  It's not as simple as just pretending it didn't happen, or that it's not a big deal, because it did, and it is. And if you're asking God to just magic the sins away, then you're not really thinking about what it means to take something away.  You can't just leave a pink ring in the tub then walk away.  It's still there.

Well, here's the deal, unfortunately.  And the deal is that the slime that we bring in doesn't go anywhere.  It sticks around.  It lasts.  It is a wholly persistent problem.  If we try to get rid of it, it won't go anywhere, it just sticks around, and sticks to different things.

Your sinfulness is like that.  It's sticky, and wiping it off of you, well, it doesn't go anywhere now, does it.  You can't make something clean without making something else dirty, and you can't get rid of your sins, and the penalty of death that they carry, without sticking them to something else.  It's the way of things, you know.  And what we expect to happen at the moment of baptism is that our sins would be taken away, but then where do they go.

They do go away, you know.  As far as the east is from the west, they are gone from us, but they do go somewhere.  They go onto Christ.  You know by now that Jesus got baptized, that he went down into the waters of the Jordan and came back up out of it.  Good to know, but the question is why.  If he's without sin, why the baptism.

He didn't get baptized to wash anything off of him, he got baptized to put something on him.  He got baptized to take that pink ring, that dirt, that filth upon himself when he dipped himself down into those waters.  Think of it as the Jordan as the place for all the runoff for all the fonts in the world, past or present.  Wherever someone is

being baptized, the slime of humanity all drains towards that one point.  And when Jesus descends into the waters of baptism, he cleans the water that we'd made dirty. He takes the sins on himself, and walks them out of the waters of baptism leaving clean water behind.  All the dirt, all the shame, all the sin of humanity, borne on his shoulders, and taken by him.  He and us, we exchange burdens.  We take his burden upon us, and learn from him, for his yoke is easy, and his burden is light.  So we take the mantle of his perfection on us, wearing it as though it was ours, and he takes our sins upon himself, and walks them to the cross.

In many ways, one of the more beautiful images in the scriptures is Jesus, right before he is crucified, having his clothes gambled over.  The soldiers can't divide it, so they have to throw dice for it.  One person wins it.  One of the soldiers who crucifies Jesus walks away with the mantle of Christ on him.  And Jesus dies wearing the soldier's sins.  That's the exchange that happens at the baptism of Christ, and our baptisms too.  We go into the water, and our sins are washed away.  He goes into the waters, and the sins cling to him.  And he then walks them all the way to the cross.

Happy, blessed, fulfilling new year, everyone.

PJ.

You talk too much.

How were your holiday parties this year? Mine were excellent.  Both the ones I went to, and the ones I hosted.  And the great thing about holiday parties is getting to spend time with all the nice people you like.  The bad thing about holiday parties is

spending time with the people you don't like.  And let me tell you, the people you don't like end up being like dogs are with me - I don't like them too much, and they seem drawn to me, as though they're going to convince me to like them by spending more time with me.  And the people you don't like, well, they seem to follow you around the parties, don't they? And they sure like to talk.

There's basically nothing worse than being stuck in a conversation with a total know it all, hey?  Isn't that the worst?  I can't stand it, which is why I keep on trying to distance myself from them.  But distancing yourself from someone who wants to talk is hard to do, because they not only want to talk, they want to be heard.  And so they will happily pursue you all over the place, all over the party, making sure you know about all their interesting opinions on things, whether you care or not.  And odds are you don't care, you just want to be part of a conversation that you're actually contributing you, but they won't let you.  They just talk and talk and talk and talk for both of you.

Now, you may say to me that you don't go to that type of party, that when you go to a party, there isn't a know-it-all there, and everyone just happily listens to all your stories, and if that is the case, I have some bad news for you.  You're the guy.  But don't feel bad, that's unavoidable, really.  This is what human beings are like.  We have a desire to be heard, to be listened to, to be the smartest person in the room.  But statistically, you won't be the smartest person in the room (it's really unlikely if I'm in the room too), so what do you do?  You either get smarter, or you pretend that you're already the smartest one there with a ton of bluster. Which would you rather do?  That's why we're all so much fun at parties.

As I've said many times before, the reason that the Bible is such a great book is because it remains eminently relevant even today, two thousand years later on. Part of the reason it remains relevant is because it talks about people as people.   People including King Solomon.  King Solomon is known as being incredibly wise, which is a good thing to be known for, surely. But lest you think that Solomon just won the genetics wisdom lottery, I have news for you.  This week's Old Testament reading tells us that Solomon had the opportunity to ask for whatever he wanted, and he chose to ask for wisdom, which is only so great because it proves for us that he knew he wasn't wise to start with.  And that's such a big deal because it's so rare.  It's not the thing any of us would start by asking for, precisely because we already feel as though we have it.  We feel as though we're the smartest people we know, if other people would just follow our lead, we'd be fine.  We usually feel that we're the smartest people in the room, on the road, in our family, or in our church, and if everyone else would just shaddap and listen to us, then we'd be in great shape.

But that's the problem, isn't it.  The problem is that it isn't true.  We're not as smart as

we think we are, we're not as bright as we'd like to think we are, but we refuse the path that Solomon took.  He knew he wasn't as wise as he needed to be, and so he asked for more wisdom.  We aren't as smart as we ought to be, but we typically just pretend, with talk and bluster.

This talk and bluster continues with our relationship with God, too.  You see, even though God knows all the answers, even though he is the source of all wisdom, we seem to think it's a good idea to tell him what's up.  We don't really let him do any of the talking, and even on things that are discussed in the scriptures, we tell him how it's going to be.  If God's word disagrees with us, odds are we don't even know, because we're too busy talking, to Him and each other.  All bluster and know it all talk, not wanting a word from God at all, just as long as we can get our talk on.

Now, we know we should listen to God, of course we should.  We don't but we know we ought to. But here's the thing, as Christians, you don't have to think about God in an abstract sense anymore.  You don't have to imagine an interaction with God as something in a vague fantasy world, but you have, in the New Testament, what interactions with God, in person, were like.  We know because of what Jesus did.

Look at the boy Jesus in the Temple.  The parts of the story that we know are the parts where the boy Jesus gets separated from his family, and they look for him, yet don't know where to find him, and eventually, they track him down in the Temple, where Jesus tells his parents that he would be in his Father's house, about his Father's business.  That's the part we all know and remember from that exchange, but here's something else we ought to bear in mind, which is what he was doing with the people who were there.  If Jesus was to be holding court in the temple, wouldn't he be lecturing people, letting them know about the truth of God's word.  We would expect him to be letting everyone know about how God's word should be understood, in the same way as he would if he came to your church tomorrow, right?

But he doesn't do that.  He shows up in the temple and he listens.  The scriptures tell us that he showed up, listened, asked quetions, and was genuinely interested in what all those people had to say.  And that's what we forget, part of incarnational

Christianity that we forget, which is that Jesus, though he is fully human like us, wasn't sinful like us.  In an exchange, in a church meeting, he doesn't do what we do, which is to talk and talk until people can't stand it anymore - He listens.  This isn't just a function of his age, either.  He listens to people all the time.  His life is spent in listening, mainly because he wants to hear what we have to say.  In the incarnation, Jesus shows us what a relationship with God is like.  He speaks, we respond, and when we respond, he listens.  We forget about this communication, and knowing that we forget, sometimes Jesus speaks to us without words.

Remember who he is.  John 1 tells you who Jesus is - he is the word of God, the word made flesh.  So that every action he takes, everything he does, is God's word played out for us.  When he heals people, he is telling us of God's care for us.  When he divides loaves and fish, he is telling us of God's love for us.  When he goes to where people are and eats with them, he is telling us of God's interest in us.  When he picks up his cross and marches up to Calvary, he is telling us how much we mean to him - more than life itself.

He knows we're bad at listening.  He designed us with half as many mouths as we have ears, and we still don't have that ratio figured out.  But he still wants us to talk.  He wants us to be able to talk to him, to tell him how we are, who we are, what our lives are like.  He wants to know, and more than that, he wants us to tell him.  Don't feel as though your life isn't important enough or pressing enough for his time.  As the Gospel reading says, he has time to sit and to listen, and he's got way more patience than we do.  But in all your talking, don't forget to listen.  All the wisdom of God is right there for you, and is available for you to take advantage of.  Hear his words, learn his truth, and be comforted by what the word of God does, not just what it says.

PJ.

gods in our bellies

As I pointed out on Sunday, my son, my eldest son, in whom I am well pleased, has asked us for a phone.  When we asked him, I thought quite reasonably, who he needs

to call, he replied that he needed to call his close friend, the boy who lives right next door.

Of course, he doesn't need to call that boy, and we only know this because they don't call each other now.  They just sort of show up at each other's houses and eat each other's food.  No problem there, then, is there.

But you and I both know that you don't get the phones these days to make phone calls.  You can tell, because if you look at old cell phone commercials, they're always talking about minutes.  How many minutes do you get a month.  But nobody talks about that now, in fact nobody even uses close to their minutes.  We have phones, but we don't use them to make calls.  Phones are used for everything else, though.  Absolutely everything else.  You can have hundreds of apps, each telling you dozens of things about the world.  Library apps, apps to check the news, weather, sports, apps to keep you connected, to teach you the guitar, and everything else. But which apps do you use.  You know which apps you use.  You use facebook and the twitter.  You log on to instagram and vine, and what do you do, well, you post pics of yourself, and wait for likes.  We spend a lot of our time doing this, working hard to get ourselves out there, and we spend an awful lot of our time looking at ourselves on the internet, on the phone, putting our best self forward even and especially if that person doesn't actually exist.

What you need to know is that the people you see online, they're the same as you.  They aren't the people they put forward either. The crazy thing is that we're all liars to each other.  But we're not really lying to each other.  We're mainly lying to ourselves.  We do this, where we fib to ourselves, we construct an elaborate idealized version of ourselves, and put that out there, to make ourselves feel better about ourselves.  But you need to know, in case you were wondering, that what people are doing when they are staring lovingly into their cell phones is that they're staring lovingly at themselves.  An ideal version of themselves.

Now in most of our communication, we talk about ourselves.  We talk about ourselves, what we do, making sure that attention is going to be paid to us almost exclusively.  We talk at great length about who we are and what we do, and if we were to have a theme song, it would be all about our best parts, what we bring to the table that is stand out and amazing.  In short, it would be about how fantastic we are, and about how the rest of the world needs to know that.  But in the gospel reading, we find something completely different.  We find the song of Simeon, and the song of Simeon isn't about himself.  It's about Jesus.

When Simeon speaks, he talks about Jesus almost exclusively.  What do we know about Simeon, only that he's old, but from his own words, he doesn't say too terribly much.  But he does talk about Jesus, about the salvation that Jesus promises, about the grace that has been promised to his people.  And there's a good reason for that.

If we were to present ourselves to God, standing on our own merits, it wouldn't be like it is on facebook, all carefully arranged selfies under perfect lighting conditions.  Nope, it would be nose picking, belching, gossiping, slacking off at work and cheating at password so you can win, even though there's no prize.  In short, it would be the real you, coupons attached.  Warts and all.  And that person would likely be quite different from the you that is posited in all those social media glamour shoots.  It would be you as you actually are.  And would you want God to see you like that.  Heck, you wouldn't even want me to see you like that, and my opinion isn't worth a whole lot.

It's a funny thing, isn't it?  The last judgment paints a picture for us of us all being naked before God, figuratively at least.  None of us are able to talk our way out of anything, none of us can possibly converse ourselves out of the situation that we are in, and all we can do is to stand there and have our lives recounted.  In Matthew 25, Jesus breaks down for us what that final questionnaire will be like, and it ends up being pretty focused on the feeding of the hungry and the care for the sick and imprisoned.

Have you been doing that this whole time?  No?

Then your song had better not be about you.  It had better be about Christ.

How quick we are to forget this, or to shrug our shoulders and move on from it, how quick we are to talk ourselves up, to speak boldly about how terrific we are, and what a great job we're doing.  But it is only when we are honest with ourselves that we realize that our songs, our words, our conversation, can't afford to be about us.  You

know you're not as good as you present to the world, you can't possibly be.  You only really have two choices, which are to either lie, both to yourself and to everyone else until you die, or to swallow your pride, and instead of ignoring all those things, to bring them before Christ.  To boast in nothing except in Christ, to rejoice in your forgiveness rather than the god in your belly.

It's hard to do, and it gets harder to do the more you tune into all the voices out there that are clamouring in your ears.  There is and will always be plenty of voices begging for your attention.  You will always be facing a torrent of people putting nothing but their best forward to you, showing you their greatness and their wonderfulness, whether you're on social media or not.  And you know that even if you try to keep up with it, you will perpetually be unhappy, measuring your real life against everyone else's fake life. The one person who does put forth his best consistently to you, is Jesus, and not only does he do so in that capacity, but he is the only one who doesn't tell you about that stuff to brag, or to boast, or to make you jealous but to invite you to partake in it. He does what he does, he attains perfection, he offers himself freely for you and tells you that it is all for you.  it is for you in every way, he gives himself up for you.  Everything that he has achieved, his perfection in the sight of God, is for your benefit, not for his.  Our joy, our hope, it all rests on that, that our boasting would be as nothing except in Christ, who takes our sins away.

Happy new year, all.

PJ.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

I've always loved the story of the annunciation.  It's a great story, since it involves the Angel Gabriel speaking to Mary in a real place at a real time.  And Gabriel comes to Mary and announces to her that she is going to conceive and give birth to a son, and to call his name Jesus.

And the thing is, Mary just sort of seems to go with it.  Mary goes with the idea without freaking out, without being too palpably concerned, without having a real meltdown over it, as many of us would.

Or does she?

The thing is, the Bible records things much like Shakespeare does, in that a lot of stuff seems pretty placid on the surface.  But to get to the real reactions, you have to chip away a bit at the language that's there, and get a bit more to what the people were doing.

According to the scriptures, what does Mary do after she has the birth of Jesus foretold to her?  Well, she does what any unwed mother of the time would do, which is to skip off, and go and see her cousin for a few months.  Why would she do that?  Why do you think?

Never forget, Mary is a human being.  She doesn't live in stained glass, she doesn't live in a Christmas pantomime, and she doesn't live in a creche, frozen thick in time.

 She lives in a house, in a town, in a country.  Sort of like you do.  And like you, if you heard that you, who were about to get married, were suddenly found to be with child from someone who wasn't your fiance, then you might get out of town for a spell too.  To go and stay with your cousin for a while.  That's what we all might do.

You see, we get to thinking that we are different from all the other generations that came before us.  We get to feeling that the people from the past are in some way fundamentally different from the people of today. We get to feeling that the people of even fifty years ago were different from us, and that gets compounded by lyrics from popular songs that talk about Christmases from long long ago.  The one I looked into on Sunday was 'it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas,' in which the boys are asking for 'a pair of hop-along boots and a pistol that shoots.'  When was the last time any of the boys on your list asked for something even vaguely like that?  Try never.  The kids these days are all into iphones and ipads and all that tut, and they certainly have no time for hop-along boots. And even if you were to try to find them, where would you go? The five and ten?

And because of this, we feel as though we have changed, that we're different, and that the people of fifty, or a hundred, or even two thousand years ago, were fundamentally different than we are.  They were focused on the divinity and glory of God, and we are into Lady GaGa and reality TV, and we couldn't be more different.  But I made this point on Sunday, and I'm going to make it again, that the people of the time of Jesus weren't different from how we are.  They were the same as we are.  They had the same issues and cares that we do.  Don't believe me? Then check out the graffiti from Pompeii, the city that got destroyed by mount Vesuvius.  When Vesuvius blew its stack, it buried the city under volcanic ash, and killed its inhabitants, who left behind all their stuff, and all their graffiti.  If you read what the people of Pompeii seemed to care about, it's not what we would be expecting from the people of Jesus' time.  It's more like what we would write on bathroom walls.  Here's a brief smattering:

Satura was here, Sept. 3rd

On April 19th, I made bread.

Antiochus hung out here with his girlfriend Cithera.

Traveler, you go to Pompeii to eat, but to Nuceria to drink.  At Nuceria, the drinking is better.

Aufidius was here.  Goodbye.

Atimetus got me pregnant.

Epaphra, you are bald!

Epahpra is bad at ball games.

And so on.  All the junk that you and I find written on bathroom walls today, right?  And yes, in case you're wondering, there are plenty of graffiti from Pompeii along the lines of 'for a good time call ....' but without phone numbers, on account of there being no phones, and heck, not even tin cans or string.  But the people of the time of Christ were just as crude, just as harsh, just as unpleasant, just as gross as the rest of us in the here and now.  They're not better people who live in stained glass or in figurines, and who never curse, never swear, never talk about adult situations.  But they did all that stuff.  We know they did, because they told us.  They told us through their words left behind for us that we might remember who they are, and what they were all about.  And they were all about the same stupid stuff as the rest of us.

Why am I on about this?  Because I think it's important.  I think it's important to remember that the people of Christ's time were just like us.  Because people haven't

changed, not really.  We still care about the same nonsense.  It's worth remembering that we are the same as Mary and Joseph, the same as the disciples, people who eat too much, tell dirty jokes, gossip about our neighbors, and get into trouble.  This is exactly who we are, and what we do.  And it's funny, really, because if we know who we are, and we know who the people of Jesus' time were, then we can see why he came to their world, beacuse it is our world too.

The point that I was trying to make on Sunday, that I hope didn't get lost on anyone, was that we spend a lot of time thinking about these people as being essentially stained glass perfect, when in reality, the people of Christ's time were the same as we are, which is why we, as humans needed Christ.  We have a way of thinking about Jesus, in that we need to insulate him from the world, or perhaps that he would insulate himself from the world, deigning only to be in churhes or holy shrines.  We have a way of thinking about things involving the sacred as being worlds apart from the day to day, but the purpose of the incarnation is that these things weren't worlds apart.  In the incarnation of Christ, the holy came down into this world, to take on our flesh and live amongst us.  The good people of Pompeii, they had the same cares, thoughts, desires and motivation as we do.  They weren't driven by altruism or charity or thoughts of holiness; it was a place where people thought about drinking,

sex, playing games, spending time with friends, baking bread, all that.  The only thing shocking about that is that we have forgotten, or have thought that the people of that time were in some way different.  But to quote Yoda from Star Wars: 'No different.  Only different in your mind.'

Jesus didn't come into a world like this one on Christmas, he came into this world.  This world with its people, its people concerned with drinking and parties, thinking about how they might enjoy themselves, bake bread, spend times with their girlfriends, all that.  He came into this world to make its inhabitants holy, to sanctify them with his blood.  His entry into the world was an entry into this world, not because it was holy, but because it needed to be made holy.  He came to Mary not because she was perfect, but because she needed to be forgiven.  If you are insisting that Jesus required to come to a pre perfected vessel, then you have missed the purpose behind his arrival. He didn't come to the righteous, but to the unrighteous.  While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  His world, and all the people in it, was just as scummy as ours, which you need to know.  Just like Christ died for all the people of Pompeii, in all their squalor and humanity, he died for us too.

This is why Christmas came to begin with, so instead of being bothered by the sin of the people of the past, be thankful that it was forgiven.  And instead of being bothered by your own sin, or pretending you don't have it, confess it to Christ, because that's why he came in the first place.