Jack Stoll, a prodious young five-year-old, hand crafted this Nativity and gifted it to us at the Tanner’s Christmas Open House. Reports are he’s making these for several friends and family members. As a perceptive Bible reader once remarked, “The wood of the manger prefigures the wood of the cross.”
Many, even many Christians, seem to believe that the aim of the spiritual life is to get to a place where you’re no longer merely human but something supposedly greater or better; to escape this “material world” for a place of pure spirit. Yet the only wise God sought to become human, to take on flesh forever; not to remain in his eternal glory, untouched by the realities of his Creation, but to be “God with us,” flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone. Even ‘now,’ as Jesus Christ rules at the right hand of the Father, a heart beats in his transfigured chest.
Some think of Christ as a kind of “Superman,” a hero from an alien plant whose embodiment was somehow different than our own, yet the Scriptures plainly teach that Christ took flesh from Mary’s blood, from her royal, fallen bloodline. He really “took on” vulnerability, contingency, helplessness, hunger, thirst, poverty, limitation, illness, betrayal, scandal, sin and death so that we, by his sanctified reality, might be secured forever against all these things. A pastor of the ancient church, Athanasius, said it like this: “what has not been assumed has not been redeemed.” Aren’t you glad for such total redemption?
The Gospel proclaims something yet more startling: that we can become by adoption the sons and daughters of God. Athanasius once preached, echoing 2 Peter 1:4, that “God became man so that we might share his divine nature.” Gloria in excelsis Deo.
Here’s a talk I gave Sunday evening to families gathered at Greg and Ann Ehlert’s home in Rochester. I pray it helps you focus on the Mystery that we anticipate in Advent, that “He who cannot be contained,” the Maker of all things, became flesh in the womb of a Palestinian teenager for our redemption and that all things might be made new.
“‘Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves’ is a saying of Jesus (Matt. 10:16). As with all of his sayings, it is he himself who interprets it. No one can look at God and at the reality of the world with undivided gaze as long as God and the world are torn apart. Despite all efforts to prevent it the eyes still wander from one to the other. Only because there is ONE PLACE where God and the reality of the world are reconciled with each other, at which God and humanity have become one, is it possible there and there alone to fix one’s eyes on God and the world together at the SAME TIME. This place lies not somewhere beyond reality in the realm of ideas. It lies in the midst of history as a divine miracle. It lies in Jesus Christ the reconciler of the world.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted on page 471 of the award-winning biography by my friend Eric Metaxas.
This is one of the most concentrated statements of the heart of Christian faith I have ever read. There is so much truth here that I have not the first idea where to start, only to say that I’m adopting the final four sentences as my CREDO.
“This Is a Great Mystery”
I’m not an Anglophile (on the order of my elder daughters and wife) and I’m not naive about the decline of the Church of England or of the complications of state churches and the cultures they either inspire or oppress, but yesterday’s ceremony touched me to the core and made me wonder at the upside of a realm where the church is wedded to the state and at why we hold such a sharp separation of church and state as we have in America as such a supreme, unadulterated good.
Westminster Abbey was yesterday a foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven. Kate’s brother, James Middleton, read Romans 12 with such conviction and presence. The Bishop of London’s sermon—which began quoting Catherine of Siena (“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire”), which didn’t hesitate to identify Jesus Christ as Lord over and over again, and which soared like a fiery arrow straight to the heart of Christian Marriage: self-sacrificial love modeled on the impossible charity of the Cross—was an unexpected tonic (though I discerned the Spirit of God heavily upon him). Rowan Williams shined, looking and sounding something a lot more like the Eastern heirarch he might have been (would like to be?) had the late seventeenth-century Nonjurors reunited with Orthodoxy. And Kate, William’s fairest, brought new meaning to the words “a bride adorned for her husband.”
The trees down the center aisle on either side were a stroke of genius on Kate’s part, evoking a restored Garden. Standing amid Westminster they suffused the nearly 800-year edifice with resurrection life. The sort of certain, beatific vision of God that gave energy and creativity to the raising of this structure over a period of three hundred years is almost impossible for moderns to imagine and we could never reproduce its craftsmanship. So much for our vaunted progress and ingenuity. And so much, also, for the so-called “Dark Ages.”
Seven Stanzas at Easter
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
John Updike, from Telephone Poles and Other Poems
The Trouble (and Blessing) of Lent
At a packed Ash Wednesday service, I read a few lines from this remarkably-perceptive meditation on Lent that appeared in—of all places—the Huffington Post (see the link above).
An inspiring and perfectly-practical reflection from a mature Christ follower, this brief article is essential lenten reading. It’s an easy read but please read it all…the second half is where the insights literally abound.
The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage he sees it not as sickness or an accident of environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future.
Flannery O’Connor, from Mystery and Manners
Ashen Foreheads, Ashen Hearts
During the nearly six years I worked for Touchstone Magazine, the daily commute ranged from the far western suburbs of Chicago to its downtown “Loop” by train and then up Milwaukee Avenue (by subway or bus) to the Northwest side, a minimum of ninety minutes one way.
One year, returning home from work on Ash Wednesday, I emerged from the Dearborn Street subway (now called the “Blue Line”) amid the usual press of commuters. Walking toward Northwestern Station along Madison Street, it seemed as if every third or fourth person had ashes on their forehead. One or two subway riders had bore ashes, but this was a revelation. Who knew so many Chicagoans were Christians?
For a block or two, each time a pedestrian with ashes passed by, I felt a surge of pride. A traditional Christian in America is made to feel part of a minority, a fringe. But for a few moments that late afternoon, my tribe, if one can call it that, was made visible by an outward sign of ashen crosses (the ash comes, in most cases, by burning fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday).
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