Resting in the Light of the New Year

“O rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing.”  These are beautiful words that encourage us to take some time beneath life’s crushing load and hear the angels sing. It is a song that invites us to rest awhile and free ourselves from the slow, painful steps that keep us from enjoying the quiet, mystical, and surprising nature of God.  “O rest…” the carol implores,  “…Rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.” 

 

As I write this post,  it is still two weeks before the Christ child is born. It is a busy time for most of us and we keep ‘toiling along the climbing way’, trying to get everything done so that Christmas can finally arrive into the hectic world we've created for ourselves. This portion of my personal favorite carol, acknowledges how easy it is for us to miss the miracle of Christmas. The carol asks of us, “have we stopped long enough to hear the angels sing?” 

At the time of this writing, I am still waiting to hear the angels sing. Still my spirit longs for something different, a future where the burdens of the past year can be forgotten and we can, once again,  gaze into the light of new beginnings.  Within a week of Christmas night is New Year’s Eve – the threshold of a future pure and bright and it is ours to have and to experience. How will your New Year begin? What kind of choices will you make? Will you make time to ‘rest beside the road and hear the angels sing?’ Or will you just slip back into the painful steps, toiling along the climbing way? How can you begin the New Year with real joy, real possibility, and real hope? 

 It is no mistake that within days of holiday cheer, the Christian Church recognizes the baptism of Jesus and the voice of God proclaiming to all the world, “This is my Son, the Beloved with whom I am well pleased!”  It is easy for us to compartmentalize the baptism of Jesus as a Jesus story and disconnect this act of grace as something that happened only to Jesus. Indeed, it is a historical fact andt three of the gospels witnessed to this event in their writings about Jesus. Yes, you can do this, but this would be a bad decision because the story of Jesus’ baptism is not just about Jesus, it is about us. Embracing the story as our own story ought to be the first best choice we make in the New Year. Yes, Jesus is the beloved child of God, but so are we. Yes, God is most pleased with Jesus, but God is most pleased with us too. The water of baptism has many meanings and we could explore all kinds of possibilities, but most importantly, the water of baptism is about resting long enough to feel God’s presence in our lives. The water of baptism is about promises made, promises lived, and promises that secure our future as God’s favorite child. The water of baptism is about resting beside the weary road and listening to the angels sing. 

As we begin this New Year, there will be changes in our life and life together. Some of the changes will be within our control, but many will not. Regardless to the kind of changes that confront us in the coming year, we must have a faith that can endure the changing landscape of our spiritual interior. Claiming the water of baptism as living water will give us the strength to step into the future with confidence, hope, possibility, and joy in spite of  ‘life’s crushing load’. This is a time to rest beside the weary road and make an important faith decision that begins, not with the New Year, but rather begins with the baptism of Jesus. This is the time to hear the angels sing. Let me end this post with the final verse from the carol that began my my post. The poet, Edmund Sears writes:

“For lo! The days are hastening on, by prophets bards foretold.

When with the ever encircling year comes round the age of gold.

When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling,

And the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing.”

At year's end, the angels would like to sing the song that we are writing. I hope you will rest long enough beside the weary road and write your verse for all the angels to sing. Time hastens on, years come and go and there is still much work to do.  May you work diligently to write the song that is the story of your own personal faith, and may you also find time to rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing.

Dear Theophilus, A Letter to a Young Seeker,

Dear Theophilus, 

 I was glad that you hung around on Thursday until I was able to talk with you. So much of ministry is taking care of business that, in the end, doesn’t matter to the believer. Spending the time with you helped me to remember that ministry is being available even when there isn’t an appointment. Ministry is listening and being present with those who have important things to say and ministry is walking a road together – not always having easy answers, but being there in times of darkness, times loneliness, and times of despair. Please know that our time together was important and I am glad I could be present with you for a time. 

Dearest Theophilus, you need to know that you are not the only person in this world going through the struggles that you have shared.  You are twenty-one years old struggling with family issues, faith issues, personal issues about what it is to be independent and to be your own person. It is not uncommon for young men, especially the oldest male child to struggle and reconcile with a father who has not always acted out of the Christian convictions that we try to model in our churches. I am remembering such stories as Isaac and Jacob, David and Absalom, or Abraham and Ishmael. Each of these sons had legitimate grievances with their fathers and struggled mightily with their role and place in the family. 

As I listened to you, I heard you identify a God that seems to ignore your cries, your prayers, and your pleas. You talked about a God who seems to thrive on testing God’s followers and never seems to be there when you need God. Although you did not expressly state it, I did hear your conflict with God as one who protects and loves and takes care of his family and you are unconsciously comparing God to your own father and this is a conflict for you.  It is very likely that your father, like you, has also been wounded. Regardless, you have found him to be demanding and not always in good, loving, and positive ways. You wanted a different kind of attention than you received from your father. You wanted him to tell you how well you had done and how proud he was of you.  But your efforts never seemed good enough. 

Dearest Theophilus,  I also heard your struggle to find joy in this life. You work hard all week, and so on weekends (if you are not working on Saturday or getting up for church on Sunday) spend time with friends where you can escape the work-a-day world for a little while, chill out, and experience relationships that lift your spirits  and helps you to laugh and know the joy you long to experience.  I heard you saying that an integral part of a night out included alcohol and in the past, drugs. I also heard you saying that this would all go away if you had a significant relationship with a woman. You expressed how you just want to keep working, get married, and have a family. I heard you saying that you are really tired of the party life. You expressed that the things that once gave you joy are no longer true. I also heard you saying that you don’t know how to get out of this despair and are hoping against hope that the faith of your childhood will somehow clear this all up for you. It may Theophilus , and that would be wonderful, but faith isn’t about doing things the right way so that you’ll get your ‘get out of jail free’ card. Faith is more than this. 

Faith is a walk with God that does not abandon God when the road becomes rocky or the hills, rugged. It is not about putting everything you ever learned in Sunday School and Confirmation into a single cry to God and that if not answered, will be the very proof you needed to convince yourself that religion is a farce – it doesn’t help anyone. Just as you don’t like to hear the phrase, “don’t ask why, Theophilus, God is testing you”, God doesn’t like to be tested either. The God I know does not wile away the hours of a day deciding who to test next and what test shall be used. God is too busy walking with us in our darkness and encouraging us to believe in ourselves, to love ourselves, and to help us discern and realize our hopes and dreams. God doesn’t have time to test us because God is walking with us in the same darkness that causes us to shout out, “God, why are you doing this to me? What have I done so wrong that I should deserve this?” The God I love, Theophilus, isn’t testing us, rather God is walking with us. 

The God that I know, through the cross, invites us to find the courage to forgive our own wrong doings and the wrong doings of others. Forgiving the way that Christ taught us is more courageous than all the guns of the world’s finest military and more powerful than drugs, either legal or illegal, that are used to heal body, mind and spirit. Forgiving, as Jesus taught us, takes a deep and abiding faith and moral convictions that confounds the powerful and the mighty. As Gandhi is known to have said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.  Forgiveness is a non-violent and subversive way that levels the playing field, humiliates the powerful, and brings justice to an unjust world. Sometime, somewhere, dear Theophilus, you will need to confront the demons of bitterness, anger, and fear and find the courage to speak the truth in love to your father and probably to yourself. 

Please do not hear me saying that this has to happen right now, because it isn’t possible. Your feelings are too raw right now, and by your own admission, you are angry. You must first attend to the rawness of your feelings and wrestle with the anger you are feeling if the forgiveness is going to be real and sincere. Let me explain this further. Amid his own guilt, anger, and incompleteness, Jacob had to wrestle with God before he could forgive himself and give and receive the forgiveness that was offered. The important lesson we can learn from Jacob and his wrestling match is that even in the fight, he didn’t give up on God; he kept fighting until he received God’s peace and ultimate forgiveness. He didn’t walk away from God, convinced that the only God, if there even is one, is a God who thrives on judgment and tests, forgetting the baby steps of goodness that we are making every day. 

I think, Theophilus, I’ve probably said enough. You have been on my heart since the day you came to me,  and I am grateful that you did. I am grateful that I was able to be present with you in a dark place – a place that feels like a day to day struggle with no foreseeable end. You are in a hard place right now, but I hope that you know that I am here for you and willing to do what I can to walk with you through this darkness into a new light that I believe is waiting for you. The great pastor and theologian, John Robinson, once said to the pilgrims as they left Europe to travel to the New Land, “I am persuaded that the Lord has more truth and light to be revealed…” and I pray that this will be true for you too, Theophilus. 

Where is your Bethlehem?

As a small child, I was just beginning to understand the difference between a place called Bethlehem and a competing narrative that talked about a place called the North Pole.  I remember that the city of Bethlehem was a pretty important part of my family’s Christmas story. For many of you, this was probably true of your family too, but for more and more people today, the city of Bethlehem is not a part of the prevailing narrative in the home at Christmas time.  

As I recall the story of Bethlehem and baby Jesus, I can see in my mind’s eye, the slow, lumbering gait of the donkey that carried a pregnant Mary uphill and down. I can see the dust of scuffling feet, blowing in the dry and arid breeze across the land as they continued their journey to this small city called Bethlehem.  The journey must have been particularly difficult for Mary. I can imagine that as they walked, Joseph would still be pondering the meaning of Mary’s pregnancy and likely frustrated that he had to make the trip at all.

Once again, we find ourselves on a journey to Bethlehem – the place where God finds hope in a dark and breezy shed. Here in a crowded village on the edge of the city where poor shepherds watch over the sheep and the silence of the night breaks forth with a crescendo of heavenly music, startling the sleepy shepherds. Here, in a breezy shed on the edge of a crowded village, God’s gift of love breaks open our hardened hearts and brings to us a new message of hope and possibility that changes lives.

  

The story that  I remember was about Mary and Joseph who were bound together by the mystery of an unplanned pregnancy. Here are two people who because of their circumstance trusted God in ways they didn’t before. The shepherds, alarmed by a chorus of angels are invited to go and see the child, the one born in the night in Bethlehem town.  When they arrive, they know that there is something different about this place – this is Holy ground and this one will bless the nations of the world. After they worshiped him, they went with haste to tell others about the One born in Bethlehem – the one who changes lives forever. 

Mary and Joseph, the shepherds or the wise men are changed by their visit to Bethlehem and so can we.  Each of us have our Bethlehem in our lives -- a place, a set of circumstances, or an event that changes us. It is that moment in our life when we see clearly, perhaps for the first time, what we must do and set out on a journey that brings us to another place, a place where God touches us and our lives are changed forever. 

Where will your journey take you this Christmas?  Where do your hopes and dreams intersect with God’s hopes and dreams? This Christmas story invites all of us to reflect upon the competing narratives of our culture at this time of year. What baggage or burdens do you bring to Bethlehem this year? Can you hear the music of the night that beckons you to a new place to ‘come and see’? When you get to your new Bethlehem, will you stand in awe and wonder in this moment or will you run into the darkness, fearful and cynical about God’s amazing love? What’s on your mind as you journey to Bethlehem? The Christmas story is an invitation to set out on a journey to find the living God that comes to us in different ways, different places, and under different circumstances. Where will your journey to Bethlehem lead you this Christmas? Safe travels, my friends and may you find the grace of God wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.