Christ Child Lullaby, a song

Little perfect newborn hands
so tiny and pure
Reaching for your mother’ s face,
clutching at her hair
One day they will clutch the cross
and bear it to the hill
Reach out to embrace the nails
Let them pierce that perfect palm
O little tiny newborn hands,
born to do the father’ s will

Little perfect newborn feet
so gentle and warm
Kicking on your mother’ s knee,
swaddled safe from harm
One day they will walk the waves
and make them calm and still
And stand in that forsaken place
And let them pierce that holy hand
O little tiny newborn feet, born to do the father’ s will

You were born to live, born to die
Three days later your would leap up on high
O little hands of God, born to beckon me
Rest now on your mother’ s knee, rest now on your mother’ s knee

Little wrinkled newborn brow crowned with a wisp of hair
Cradled in your mother’ s arms, quiet and fair
One day they will sweat forth blood and bear a crown of thorns
Twisted out of sin and shame
To break and mock your holy name
O little wrinkled newborn brow, born to bear our sin alone

Little crying newborn eyes so dark and so deep
Seeking for your mother’ s breast for comfort and sleep
One day they will see the grave and weep on that morn
Weep for our helplessness
Weep in your love for us
O little crying newborn eyes, born to bear our sin alone

You were born to live, born to die
Three days later you would leap up on high
O little eyes of God, born to seek for me
Sleep now on your mother’ s knee, Sleep now on your mother’ s knee

House of Bread, a Christmas Poem

O little humble House of Bread
how still we see thee
rise--
where once they buried
long ago his father's father's father's
father's one true love,
whose ancient tears his coming will
unwittingly awake--
(Rachel, weeping, because her innocents are no more)

O little simple house of bread:
in whose heart of mystery
is born today
the Christ child's hidden presence:
stolen away by dreams and night
and brought back to us the same--
(that out of Egypt Rachel's innocents might find their way back home)

O little broken house of bread,
soaked that day, and now today,
in wine-red blood
(that she, at last, might find God's solace for her tears)--
at your table we discover it again:
the hopes and fears of all the years
are truly met in thee
tonight.

Holy Sisyphus, a song

Holy Sisyphus, you're almost at the top
Holy Sisyphus, now's no time to stop
I know it weighs a tonne,
But you're almost done
Holy Sisyphus

Holy Sysiphus, just try to keep your grip
Holy Sysiphus, don't let your fingers slip
Though they're worn to the bone
Just keep rolling that stone
Holy Sysiphus

Rock on, Holy Sysiphus
(keep rolling, keep rolling)
Rock on, Holy Sysiphus
(keep rolling, keep rolling)
Rock on, Holy Sysiphus
(Keep rolling along)

Holy Sysiphus, you roll back down to the start
Holy Sysiphus, don't let it crush your heart
Until you come to the end,
Just start up the hill again
Holy Sysiphus

Rock on, Holy Sysiphus
(keep rolling, keep rolling)
Rock on, Holy Sysiphus
(keep rolling, keep rolling)
Rock on, Holy Sysiphus
(Keep rolling along)

A Drink Offering for Jesus, a devotional thought

In 1 Chronicles 11 we find this strange story about King David and his mighty men that leaves me sort of scratching my head. Here’s the Coles notes: it’s during one of his battles against the Philistines, and the Philistines have set up a garrison at Bethlehem (his hometown). It says: “David longed for water and said, ‘Oh that someone would get me a drink from the well near the gate of Bethlehem.’”

It’s not clear if he was serious about this or not, but his Three top warriors hear it, and take up the mission. They break through the Philistine ranks, draw the water from the Bethlehem well, and bring it back to David.

And here’s the head scratcher: when they give him the cup, David refuses to drink it. “God forbid that I should do this!” he said. “Should I drink the blood of these men who went at the risk of their lives?” So instead, he pours it out on the ground. It’s a bit strange, because it seems like these Three men have just stared down death itself to get a glass of water for their King, and rather than being honoured by it, he pours it out. But when you realize that he’s pouring it out as a libation (a drink offering) to God (v. 11:18), it comes into better focus. Rather than receiving this costly cup of water for himself, David gives their risky, daring, valiant exploit to the Lord.

This story upgrades from curious to powerful as soon as you remember that, as King of Israel, David is a type of the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. Because the point here is that the true Messiah is worthy of every feat of daring, every risky venture, every life-on-the-line mission we take for him, and as we step out in faith on these (apparently) foolhardy missions, he takes all that courage and daring and devotion and bravery, like a tall cool drink of water and pours it out on our behalf before the Lord God himself. Who wouldn’t risk life and limb for a Messiah like He is?

Intersections (A Reflection on Heaven)

The Thursday Review: Triumphal Entries and the True Meaning of Christmas

first posted December 16, 2010

A while ago I shared some observations on the connections in Luke's Gospel between the nativity narrative and the triumphal entry. Namely: when Jesus is born, angels sing peace on earth and glory in the highest; and later when Jesus rides triumphant into Jerusalem, the disciples echo this back, shouting peace in heaven and glory in the highest.

Luke's not the only one to draw parallels between Christ's birth and his Triumphant Entry. In Matthew's narrative, three magi enter Jerusalem asking about the one born "King of the Jews," and all Jerusalem (Herod included) is "disturbed" at the query (2:3). No wonder they trembled, inasmuch as "King of the Jews" is the exact title Rome had given Herod himself back in 40 BC. This child's birth is as direct a challenge to the powers that be as Jerusalem could imagine.

But, curiously, when Jesus rides his revolutionary donkey into Jerusalem, in open defiance of those powers that be, Matthew notes how all of Jerusalem was "shaken" at the sight (21:10). Like Luke, Matthew seems intent on having the nativity narrative echo hauntingly in the background of this momentous occasion: when he was born, he stirred up the city's complacency; when he rode, thirty three years later, through the gates as its rightful and perfect king, he shook that complacency to its foundations.

I call this curious because I know that if I were to point to an event that fulfilled the "meaning" of Christ's birth, I'd point intuitively and directly to the cross; and yet these inspired narrators of Jesus' story point, instead, and specifically, to the Triumphal Entry. And I can't help but wonder why (admitting, at the same time, that the Triumphal Entry only has meaning because of the way the cross and resurrection turned the very notion of "triumph" on its head).

But maybe Matthew's point here is that the "true meaning" of this child's birth, in part, lies in the way God issues His Messianic challenge, through him, to the status quo-- to Sadducean elitism, to Herodian despotism, to Pharisaical legalism, to Roman hegemony. So when he rides a gentle donkey into the City of the Great King, as the ultimate revelation of God's challenge to the status quo, nothing could be more fitting than to remember how he once squirmed helpless on the knee of his shamed mother in the humble city of David, while foreigners and outsiders hailed him as Lord and "the status quo" worried to hear him named.

And I'm left wondering: what would it look like if we had a "Triumphal Entry" Christmas this year? What might it mean for us if we let Christmas shake our complacency to its foundations and let Mary's Boy Child Jesus Christ, in his coming, issue God's direct challenge to our status quo-- our spiritual elitisms, our unacknowledged despotisms, our self-righteous legalisms, our unseen hegemonies-- where ever they might be?

Creative Being (III): Poetry and the Christian Life

In The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson makes an off-hand observation about the intuitive connection between pastoral work and poetry. “Is it not significant,” he asks rhetorically, “that the biblical prophets and psalmists were all poets? It is a continuing curiosity that so many pastors, whose work integrates the prophetic and psalmic (preaching and praying), are indifferent to poets. In reading poets, I find congenial allies in the world of words. In writing poems, I find myself practicing my pastoral craft in a biblical way.”

Emphasis added; because I also write poetry, and have experienced something profoundly biblical, too, in this careful quest for just the right words and those loving efforts to arrange them just so.

Incidentally, I have also noticed the same indifference to poetry among many contemporary pastors. Most of the pastors who raised me, spiritually speaking, were no-nonsense farmers putting it plainly in the pulpit, or former intervarsity jocks reliving their glory days, adept at squeezing the 23rd Psalm into three preachable points perhaps, but uninterested in letting the weight of those words settle with any ambiguity: even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ...

In Subversive Spirituality, Peterson returns to this thought, in an effort to explain why the Book of Revelation was written as a poem and not (contrary to the suppositions of the Left-Behinders) as an Apocalypse Survival Manual. It’s because “a poet uses words primarily not to explain something,” he argues, “but to make something. Poet (poetes) means ‘maker.’ Poetry is not the language of objective explanation but the language of imagination. It makes an image of reality in such a way as to invite our participation in it.”

Emphasis added again; this time because I want to linger over the stuff that makes poetry unique as a form of human expression. It is not simply descriptive speech, but creative speech (Peterson’s right, by the way: the etymology of poem takes us back to the Greek, poiein, “to make or create”). Inasmuch as the language of poetry does this—invites our active, imaginative participation in the hitherto unseen quality of a thing, creating new worlds of possibility and potential—to the extent that Peterson is right and poetry is not “an examination of happens but an immersion in what happens”—to the degree that poetry was the preferred mode of expression of the psalmists and the prophets for a reason—there is, I think, something essentially and necessarily poetic about Christian Spirituality.

Now: before you head off to Starbucks with your moleskin notebook to scratch out your feelings in verse over a steaming Grande Pike, let me clarify. I am not saying that Christians must necessarily write poems, or read them. Nor am I saying that poets make better Christians. I do think Christians could do worse than to read a poem every now and then; I do think it could hardly hurt for every Christian to try their hand at verse once in a while; and I do think the church would be a better place if more Christians felt it in their soul what it means to say something like: “the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with, ah! bright wings.” But that’s the former English teacher in me talking, not the pastor.

What the pastor in me is saying is that when we experience genuine Christian spirituality we are, in fact, experiencing that creative quality of the word that all authentic poetry is grasping after. As we earnestly, fully and wholeheartedly pursue what it means to be a man or a woman made in the image of God remade in the Image of Christ, the Word made flesh, we are doing something inherently poetic, even if we never find the perfect rhyme for silver.

I don’t mean this abstractly, either; I mean it very concretely. Because all Christian Spirituality begins, actually, with prayer. I realize, of course, that almost no statement about Christian Spirituality is uncontroversial.  Theologically I should have said it starts with Christ, revealed by the Spirit and attested to in the Scriptures, but the beginning of our active participation in these things is experienced through prayer. 

Prayer is the essential and necessary activity of Christian Spirituality. And whatever else prayer is—it’s more than this, to be sure, but it is hardly less than this—prayer is poetry.

Again: in saying this I do not mean that our prayers should rhyme, or alliterate, or employ iambic tetrameter. If so, "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" would be a masterpiece of Christian prayer and Dr. Seuss the Most Spiritual Man of All. What I am trying to do here is just bring together the fact that poetry really does invite our active participation in the reality it bespeaks, and the fact that Christian prayer not only invites this, too, but actually answers the invitation.

In praying "Thy will be done, thy kingdom come," we are also participating in the will of the Father and tasting the coming of his Kingdom. On a more immediate level: when we pray for grace, truth, help, hope, sustenance, healing, restoration, the peace of Christ that transcends all understanding, we discover ourselves actively participating in these things as the Holy Spirit realizes them in our lives.

Theologians refer to this as the “efficacy of prayer,” that fact that prayer effects the things we pray for. But today I want to call it the “poetry of prayer,” the fact that the words we speak in prayer spiritually immerse us in what we are praying about.  And the faithful Christian in prayer, even if she doesn't know Gerard Manley Hopkins from Adam, still, in those whispered words that the heart alone understands, to a loving Father by a Spirit who intercedes on her behalf with groans that words alone could never express, she is breathing out poetry of the purest kind, and discovering, I think, the reason poetry was given us in the first place.

Learning to Fly, a song

When you reach the top
You’re only just starting to climb
So keep rising up
The jump is gonna be sublime

You’ll be soaring across the sky
You’re not falling you’re learning to fly
Just hold your head up and
just hold your wings out and
don’t let this moment pas by
You’ll be soaring across the sky

And you’re not alone
You’re walking where angels dare
So just don’t look down
You’ll be  flying  on a wing and a prayer

You’ll be soaring across the sky
You’re not falling you’re learning to fly
Just hold your head up and
just hold your wings out and
don’t let this moment pas by
You’ll be soaring across the sky

Just keep the ground below you
Just keep the sky above and
Just keep the wind against your face
The wings of the dawn will show you
How deep, how high his love and
You  will be lifted on his grace

You’ll be soaring across the sky
You’re not falling you’re learning to fly
Just hold your head up and
just hold your wings out and
don’t let this moment pas by
You’ll be soaring across the sky

Taking Sides, a devotional thought

The other night I was reading in the Book of Joshua,, where the angel of the Lord meets Joshua just before he goes into battle against Jericho. It's such an interesting exchange. Joshua sees "a man standing before him with a drawn sword," and he asks this Heavenly Warrior, "Are you for us or for our enemies?"

There's a good sermon or two waiting to be preached in the angel's reply. "Neither," he says, "But as the commander of the Lord's army, I have now come."

That simple "Neither" is sobering, humbling and inspiring all at once. It's so easy to assume, especially when you're sure (as Joshua must have been) that you're doing God's work, that he's unequivocally "on your side," endorsing your cause, under-writing your agenda and what have you. Yet here's Joshua about to engage the hosts of Jericho and right before he takes the field God tells him, essentially, "Don't assume that I'm on your side in this fight, as though I were some tribal god you can keep in your back pocket, to guarantee you achieve your goals" (That's the sobering part); and by implication, he tells him, "The question's not 'is God on my side in this conflict?' but: 'am I on God's side, ready and willing to conduct myself at his direction for his purposes alone?'" (that's the humbling part); and by further implication: "Listen, God's will is going to be accomplished, and to be standing with him when it is, that alone is the greatest victory and highest success of all" (that's the inspiring part).

To be clear: when I read the battle narratives in Joshua, I tend to follow the Apostle Paul's lead, who wrote that for Christians, our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual powers in the heavenly realms. That is to say: I understand the battles in Joshua as paradigmatic for the spiritual struggles we face, and the spiritual "battles" we fight in the spiritual life. And when I take that approach with Joshua 5:13-15, this is what it says to me: Look: God's on God's side; the ultimate question is, are you there, with him?

The Thursday Review: Hark the (Other) Herald

first published June 9, 2010

Each of the four gospel writers put something different on the lips of the crowds as Jesus rode his triumphant donkey into Jerusalem the week before Passover. For Matthew, it was a reference to his Davidic pedigree. With a hosanna. For Mark, it was a reference more broadly to the coming "Kingdom of our father David." With a hosanna. For John it was a reference to Jesus as simply "the king of Israel." With a hosanna. (And yet not so simply, inasmuch as for John, Yahweh himself is the only true King of Israel).

But for Luke there was no "hosanna." Instead, the crowd shouted: "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord." And then they added: "Peace in heaven and glory in the highest."

Now if I were a stout harmonizer, I'd want to throw in one of Matthew's Davidic references or one of Mark's Hosannas here for good measure. But because I'm not anymore, something jumped out at me when I read Luke 19:38 the other day that I can't get out of my mind.

"Peace in heaven and glory in the highest" cheered the crowds; and I wonder: did they know they were echoing the very words of the angelic host that heralded Christ's birth so many chapters (and some 33 years) earlier, when he was wrapped in swaddling clothes and a celestial choir declared "Glory to God in the highest / and on the earth peace ... "? Whether they heard the echoes or not, Luke doesn't seem to want us to miss them: in the original Greek, the parallels are quite striking. 2:19 reads "Glory in the highest to God, and on earth peace..." while 19:38 echoes back: "in heaven peace and glory in the highest" (almost as though they were open and close brackets respectively to the gospel narrative that has brought us to this point.)

But this is more than just a clever literary device. With its subtle echo of those of herald angels who sang glory to the newborn king back in 2:19, Luke's account of the Triumphal Entry here actually teaches us what it means to sing "God and sinners reconciled" in the fullest sense. Because as the God-Man, Jesus Christ always acts both as God before man, on God's side, and as man before God, on our side. Or as Paul put it, there is only one mediator between God and man; the man Christ Jesus.

So, when God-come-in-the-flesh was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, God made peace with humans-- in Jesus, the fully divine Messiah. Thus heavenly heralds filled the skies declaring peace on earth. But as the mediator between God and humanity, Jesus not only reconciles God to sinners, he also reconciles sinners to God. So when the true King of God's people rode humbly into the city of God's people to be enthroned as God's Prince of Peace, man made peace with God-- in Jesus, the fully human Messiah. Thus earthly heralds declared peace in heaven.

Jesus has reconciled heaven to earth; and he has reconciled earth to heaven. And in Jesus, and through faith in Jesus, we are invited to become ambassadors of that reconciliation in the fullest sense: declaring with radiant angels and dusty disciples alike that Jesus Christ has made perfect peace between Creator and creation.

Bonjour, Ma Petite

Bonjour ma petite, je te chante la bienvenue
Nous t’avons attend tant
Et peut-etre que ce monde, il t’est inconnu
Mais ce bras t’aimeront toujours tant
Alors, ferme tes yeux et reve dans ton coeur
Et plus tard tu le decouvririas
Alors reste ici, tout pres de mon coeur
 Et ces bras t’aimeront toujours tant

Hello, little one I sing your welcome
We have waited a long time for you
And maybe this world is a stranger to you
But these arms, they will always love you
So close your eyes and dream in your heart
Tomorrow you will seek you will find
But rest right here, right next to my heart
And these arms, they will always love you

Parental Sacrifices, a devotional thought

I was reading Leviticus the other night and this half-baked thought occurred to me.  If you're not used to Leviticus, you need to understand that in the ancient world, animal sacrifice was just a regular part of worship and wouldn't have even raised an eyebrow for anyone; and as Christians we believe that all of the requirements for sacrifice are fulfilled and satisfied in Christ. So don't let the fact of animal sacrifice trouble you too much.  You just have to draw out its meaning for us, today, as followers of Jesus.

And here's where the half-baked thoughts started to rise in the oven: because in Leviticus 12, it's explaining what a woman's supposed to do when she gives birth, and it says, she's to offer a lamb for a burnt offering (burnt offerings are sort of "celebration / thanksgiving" offerings, so that makes sense: "Thanks, God for bringing this new life into the world").  But then it says that she's to offer a pigeon or a dove for a sin offering. And that's the one that's always troubled me, because, really, why would a woman have to offer a sin offering after giving birth? Surely it's not because there's something sinful about parenthood. And surely it's not because there's something sinful about the fact of giving birth. The OT through and through consistently sees children as only a gift and blessing from God. So I never really knew what to do with this one.

But then, like I say, it occurred to me: new mothers (and elsewhere, fathers, though for different reasons and at different times) needed to make a sin offering, not because they've sinned by becoming new parents, but because children need godly parents. Inasmuch as the sin offering was the Old Testament's mechanism whereby a right relationship with God was established and maintained and deepened and strengthened, the "maternal sin offering," I think, is more for the sake of the new child than it is for the new mother.

When I think of myself, for instance, and how self-centred and spiritually immature and unworthy to be a dad I was when my children were born—and how Christ graciously met me in that and helped me to grow—when I put it in that context, the idea of needing a "sin offering" upon becoming a new parent starts to make a lot of sense. After all: what could be better for kids, really, than if every parent took seriously their need to deal with their own sin through Christ, in order to be the kind of parent their kids most need?

Breathe

The Thursday Review: On Winning the War on Christmas

first published January 7, 2011

I've been thinking a lot this year about the War on Christmas. Apparently a secular campaign has been raging for almost a decade now against religious traditions that Christians hold dear (like greeting one another with a decisive "Merry Christ-mas" (while wassailing, of course, with figgy puddings and jingling sleigh bells among the leaves so green)). As a way of describing the increasing secularization of the winter holiday season, conservative American media personalities like Bill O'Riley and Peter Brimelow first popularized the the term "War on Christmas" around the turn of the new millennium. I'm always the last to know. Until recently, I had been living like a Yule-tide Switzerland, blissfully neutral to the whole conflict, but the war on Christmas became a specially poignant issue to me this year, in part because it kept coming up on the blogs I was reading through Christmas (see especially here).

Tactics in the War on Christmas include: infiltration of our traditional password protocol by replacing "Merry Christmas" with the insidiously innocuous "Happy Holidays," trade embargoes on traditional carols in schools, and guerrilla attacks on creches in public places.

But these things aren't especially why "The War on Christmas" was on my mind this Holiday (read: Christmas) Season. It's a parallel issue that I've been wrestling with-- and this one seriously wrestling with-- the gross commercialization of Christmas.

I'm not sure if it was because a) I watched the (very flawed) film What Would Jesus Buy at the start of Advent this year, or if it's because b) I'm still working through some issues about what it means to be a pastor at Christmas time, or if it's because c) the commercialization of Christmas really has gotten grosser than ever... but it sure seemed like answer "c" to me this year. My wrestling has to do with this question: Do we really honour Christ's name best by associating it so closely with this frenzied celebration of stuff? Like I prayed in a prayer at church one Sunday morning: it seems almost silly for us to say: Jesus is the Reason for the Season. The one who came to give us divine simplicity, pure generosity and holy rest; is he the reason for all of this hectic buying and getting and rushing around?

I don't have easy answers to these questions, except to confess that they were heavier on my heart this year than ever before. At its heaviest, the question hit me like this: Do we crucify Christ every Christmas, when we throw ourselves a hedonistic winter bacchanalia, and then justify it by glossing it with his name?

And the moment that question hit me, I thought of the War on Christmas.

And I thought: how like the God of the Crucified Jesus would it be, if he won the War on Christmas by losing it absolutely and altogether? Because if we really did reach a time when Christ's name was no longer associated with the market economy's year end projections-- if there really did come a day when the last vestiges of its Christian trappings were stripped away from the fundamentally pagan celebration of consumption that happens every December-- if the Holiday Season really did banish the Christ from the party we once held in his honour, for good--

Well: what freedom to really celebrate the "Reason for the Season" might we discover then, stepping glorious out of the empty tomb of all our "Merry Christmases"?