Pastoral Sadness

There is an old adage that says, “a mother is only as happy as her saddest child.”  As a father I know that to be true.  I have a son who is struggling with his faith right now and he is not happy.  There is the narrative that he was raised with in our home and the narrative that he is living right now in art school and those stories are not even close to harmonizing; in fact, they are striking a dissonant chord.

Remember the famous story Jesus told about the two sons?  Jesus never mentions that the reason the younger son wanted his inheritance early so he could leave and squander it was due to any failure on the father’s part.  Whew, I think.  Maybe I should let myself off the guilt hook.  And yet as I watch him live out his life in ‘the far country’ I ache for him to love and know the Jesus I know.  I search my memories for where I failed him as a father and pastor.  How did he drift so far?

I am running a low-grade fever of sadness while he is prodigalizing in Portlandia.

As I sit here looking out at the Sound and see large gulls soaring on thermals over the water, I am seeing other faces that make my heart grow sad.  Not children of mine.  I see faces of congregants; people who are trying so hard to find their way in this world without Jesus.  Oh, they come to church.  Some come regularly, some intermittently but they are in my flock and I am their shepherd.  And while I am delighted with our church family and I am at peace with Jesus, I am also very aware that my sense of melancholy is tied to the saddest member of my church.

I am careful about boundaries.  I am quite willing to let people feel the full weight of the consequences of their sins.  These consequences can be their best tutors.  But, oh this weight, this cloud, this dull and throbbing ache for the people for whom I have been given charge is relentless.

Matthew tells us that Jesus felt this heaviness, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36)

The Apostle Paul commands all Christians to, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”  (Galatians 6:4)

I wonder if this sadness is part of bearing the burden.  I wonder if in bearing we are more present.  I wonder if being more present with them leaves open the opportunity to run to them when they “come to themselves” and realize all that is waiting for them in the Father’s house.  I believe this sadness keeps a father on the front porch looking down a long and dusty road for a broken and sad boy to come walking home.  And when he sees the familiar stride of his child, to be quick to leap off the porch and run down the road to embrace his son.  And it is this sadness that makes a pastor stand on the porch of a little church every Sunday morning looking at a parking lot for that troubled family to drive up.

So, I wait and watch—ready to run to both my son and you.

For I am a pastor.

My Top Reads of 2011

I thought I would share with you my top reads for 2011 and why I liked them so much.  You will see that they fall into three basic categories, History, Novels and Church related.  I read other genre’s but these are the three rails that keep me energized throughout the year.  I have placed them in order of impact for me.  I also have included portions of the book descriptions from the publisher to give you a better idea of what the book is about.

1.     The Pastor: A Memoir by Eugene Peterson.

Few books have moved me at a visceral level as this book.  I admire Peterson for his honesty and humanness in writing this book.  His analogy of the similarities between his father as a butcher and how that prepared him to be a pastor is compelling.  And the story of his first convert to Christianity in grade school left me laughing on the floor.  If I had my way I would make this required reading for all pastors.  The book made me proud of my profession.  I am a pastor.

The Pastor steers away from abstractions, offering instead a beautiful rendering of a life tied to the physical world—the land, the holy space, the people—shaping Peterson’s pastoral vocation as well as his faith. He takes on church marketing, mega pastors, and the church’s too-cozy relationship to American glitz and consumerism to present a simple, faith-filled job description of what being a pastor means today. In the end, Peterson discovered that being a pastor boiled down to “paying attention and calling attention to ‘what is going on right now’ between men and women, with each other and with God.” The Pastor is destined to become a classic.

2. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Mataxas

I kept telling my wife as I was reading this book, “But I don’t want Dietrich to die.” A definitive, deeply moving narrative, Bonhoeffer is a story of moral courage in the face of the monstrous evil that was Nazism.

After discovering the fire of true faith in a Harlem church, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany and became one of the first to speak out against Hitler. As a double-agent, he joined the plot to assassinate the Fuhrer, and was hanged in Flossenberg concentration camp at age 39. Since his death, Bonhoeffer has grown to be one of the most fascinating, complex figures of the 20th century.

3. Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation, by Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken

This book articulated what I have been feeling for years about the current state of the attractional model of Church in our culture.  I found it compelling and courageous.  Its the story of how God took a thriving, consumer-oriented church and transformed it into a modest congregation of unformed believers committed to the growth of the spirit–even when it meant a decline in numbers.

As Kent and Mike found out, a decade of major change is not easy on a church. Oak Hills Church, from the pastoral staff to the congregation, had to confront addiction to personal ambition, resist consumerism and reorient their lives around the teachings of Jesus. Their renewed focus on spiritual formation over numerical growth triggered major changes in the content of their sermons, the tenor of their worship services, and the reason for their outreach. They lost members. But the health and spiritual depth of their church today is a testimony of God’s transforming work and enduring faithfulness to the people he loves. Honest and humble, this is Kent and Mike’s story of a church they love, written to inspire and challenge other churches to let God rewrite their stories as well.

4. Whole Life Transformation: Becoming the Change Your Church Needs, by Keith Meyer

I loved this book so much that I bought six hard back copies and gave them to the young leaders of our church and have been meeting at 6:00AM on Saturday mornings to work our way through it.

2011 Golden Canon Leadership Book Award winner! Ministry to others and growing the church were the center of Keith Meyer’s life. And yet he was arguing with his wife about how many nights a week he was spending in meetings. His temper was short, and he was exhausted. Keith writes: “I can see that I was pursuing a twisted idea of ‘success’–not in the secular forms I regularly preached against, but in the sanctified activism and workaholism sometimes called ‘professional ministry.’

A growing church, defined mostly by higher attendance at church services, more and more programs, and bigger budgets and buildings were the marks of a successful ministry in the clergy circles I ran with at that time.” In the midst of his pain Keith discovered a new way of living–one that truly depended on Christ to redeem and reform his character. And then as he was transformed, he discovered that the change in him was changing the way that he was pastoring and leading others. Drawing from the riches of church history and the experience of contemporary ministry, Keith Meyer writes with the voice of a prophet and the heart of a pastor. If you’re ready to stop trying to follow Christ and start training to be a Christ follower, this is the book for you.

5. Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead.

Novels are where deep truth are found.  Well turned phrases help me write better sermons.  The drama and tension in a novel make me a better story teller.  All of these are excellent reasons to read fiction.  This book is language at its best.  Set in 1916, Far Bright Star follows Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, as he leads an expedition of inexperienced soldiers into the mountains of Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong and the patrol is brutally attacked. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert.

Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield. Olmstead, an award-winning writer, uses his precise, descriptive prose to explore the endurance and fate of the last horse soldiers. The result is a tightly wound novel that is as moving as it is terrifying.

6. Outer Dark, by Cormac McCarthy

In my opinion this is the nation’s greatest living fiction writer.  He is an acquired taste, however.  He is brutal and violent.   But no one and I mean no one creates a sentence with such force and eloquence as McCarthy.  I read and re-read his works.

Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century.  A woman bears her brother’s child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes.  Discovering her brother’s lie, she sets forth alone to find her son.  Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

7. Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow

I love historical biography’s.  This one is one of the best.  I enjoy reading how men and women of history made decisions and handled stress and difficulties.  There is so much misinformation surrounding our first president that it is appalling at times.  This is a great book.

In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life of Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America’s first president.

8. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard

One of the saddest biographies I have read.  This is a little known and fascinating man who became president reluctantly.  James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back.

But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his condition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet.

9. The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows, by James Bryan Smith

This is a simple and yet very profound book on how our imaginings about God affect how we live out our lives on a day-by-day basis.  Our false narratives about God affect how we live.

“God wants me to try harder.” “God blesses me when I’m good and punishes me when I’m bad.” “God is angry with me.” We all have ideas that we tell ourselves about God and how he works in our lives. Some are true–but many are false. James Bryan Smith believes those thoughts determine not only who we are, but how we live. In fact, Smith declares, the most important thing about a person is what they think about God.

The path to spiritual transformation begins here. Turning to the Gospels, Smith invites you to put your ideas to the test to see if they match up with what Jesus himself reveals about God. Once you’ve discovered the truth in Scripture, Smith leads you through a process of spiritual formation that includes specific activities aimed at making these new narratives real in your body and soul as well as your mind.

10. Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey into the Human Heart,  by Lynn Schooler

I bought this book in Junuea while on a cruise this summer and finished before I got home.  I love the way this man writes.  It is a fascinating look at the way the wilderness can be a place of self-discovery during difficult times.

Lynn Schooler had recently lost a dear friend and was feeling his marriage slipping away from him when he set out on a daring journey-first by boat, then on foot-into the Alaskan wilderness to clear his head. His solo expedition, recounted in Walking Home, is filled with the awe and danger of being on one’s own in the wild, being battered by the elements and even, for two harrowing days, becoming the terrified quarry of a grizzly bear.

But the formidable, lonely landscape is also rich with human stories-of trappers, explorers, marooned sailors, and hermits, as well as the myths of the region’s Tlingit Indians. Relating his journey, Schooler creates a conversation between the human and the natural, the past and the present, to investigate-on a remote and uninhabited shore-what it means to be not only part of nature’s wild web, but also a member of a human community in the flow of history.

Well, there they are.  I certainly read more than these ten, but these affected my thinking or moved my heart in some pretty profound ways.

Why We are Here

Behind many of the front doors of the nice homes in our community are broken, torn and hurting people.  Many of them are so busy pursuing the American Dream that they are too pre-occupied to notice that they are not in love with their spouses anymore and their children don’t know them.  They are medicating the emptiness with all sorts of strategies.  They need us to show them the way to restoration.  We are a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints.

Restoring God’s world one heart at a time.

Why?  Because we have been uniquely equipped and called by God to do this.  We have the right experience as a congregation; we have the right passion as a people.  And we have shared values that we believe if all the people who live in our community would hold then restoration would begin.

Our Values…

•             Mending Brokenness

Bringing healing to the secret places of the soul where the facades of security, success, and significance we present to the world only succeed in imprisoning the person God intended us to be.

•             Deepening Faith

Presenting everyone mature in Christ, everybody complete, everybody whole, everybody just the way God designed them to be.   So that human lives can flourish as God intended them to flourish, so that the power of sin might lose its grip on humanity.

•             Strengthening Families

Preparing the next generation for the journey of life by understanding that life is not a series of random, arbitrary acts, but that we all are part of God’s epic story of conflict, victory, love, and restoration.

•             Pursuing Peace

Establishing (building, creating, developing, joining) God’s dream that all the people of the world are woven together into a beautiful, harmonious, interdependent, knitted and webbed relationship with each other and the physical world.

Going forward we will dig deep into these values.  We will protect these values.  We will filter everything we do in this church though those values.  If an activity does not move us closer to living out those values we will not do it.  We will live out those values as a church and as a individuals.

If I declare that to increase my health physical exercise will be a high value of mine, what evidence would you sees of that value?

How Will We Know We Are Hitting the Mark?

We will know when Sunday after Sunday we will see…

•             Wounded Healers

Wounded healers leave here ready and willing to speak words of grace and truth into the hearts of fragmented lives. Sometimes just to listen, sometimes to just pray, but we will be agents of healing.

•             Mature Believers

We will see Christ followers falling deeper and deeper in love with Jesus and see their Biblical wisdom in a steady growth trajectory up and to the right.  They will want to learn more, give more, love more, serve more all bring glory to the God who has saved them.

•             Strong Families

We will see families building their foundations on the life of Jesus, his teachings, and his example; a legacy of faithful dependence on Jesus that will set them apart in this world.

•             Peace Makers

We will send out peace makers into the community that are committed to advancing the Kingdom God.  What upsets God will upset us.  What burdens the heart of God will burden our hearts.  We will leave every Sunday so affected by the love of Jesus and so filled by the presence of the Holy Spirit that we will infect our community with God’s Shalom.  It will be an Immaculate Infection.

What is Our Long-range Strategy for Restoration?

Our strategy won’t be easy, but it should be relatively simple. We will provide three safe environments.

•             Worship

Since worship is a human response to a divine revelation and every time we gather as a group in Jesus name we know God will say something, then we must respond.  God says something and we respond to it; God does something, and we respond to it.  Sometimes it means we laugh and shout to the Lord.  Sometimes it means we applaud.  Sometimes it means we weep for the joy of grace; sometimes we weep for the sorrow of sin.  Sometimes we are loud.  Sometimes we are quiet.  But worship always requires a response. And whenever we respond to God, we are changed.

•             Growth Groups

We will meet in one-on-one and in little groups in homes, coffee houses, and a various other venues for the purpose of encouraging each other to keep running the race, to learn more about who Jesus is, comfort each other when life kicks us in the teeth, and to hold each other accountable when we want to drift away from Him.

•             Serving Teams

We will serve each other, we will serve our community and we will serve the world.  There are countless little things that we can do that will teach us humility and bring civility to this hostile world.

There are people who need our hands and feet to do for them what they can’t do for themselves.

There are causes we will be involved in because there are voiceless people who need someone will lift them up and make things right.  We will bring the Kingdom of God to bear in this world.  There are water wells to be dug, vitamins to distribute, micro-financing to offer and human trafficking to end.

We will serve the city for the sake of the city. 

God will be pleased when we join Him in this restoration covenant that is as ancient as Noah and the Ark.  Nothing pleases the Father more than to see His children join Him in bringing ‘Up There Down Here.’  We will join with the Father to make His dream come alive on this earth.

There are hearts that need to be restored to right relationship with God through Jesus.  There are marriages that need to be restored through deep community with other brothers and sisters in Christ.  There are families that need to be restored through wise counsel and life-coaching centered in the Bible.  There are leaders that need to be called and equipped to pass on to the next generation this mission and these values. There are wrongs in this society that need to be righted, that can only be righted if we burn with a righteous anger and then get up and do something about those wrongs.

For if the Gospel is not good news for everybody it is not good news for anybody.

One day the leaders in our community will come to us and say, “It is better for us that you are here.”  They will be glad that there is a group of people so committed to personal and social restoration.

And the scripture will be true about us that says, “When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices…”  Proverbs 11:10

Let’s do this.

Why Can’t Every Day Be Like Christmas?

When we think of the feelings we have that surround December 25th, there is an attitude, or a cultural mood, a mindset that just seems nicer.

People are friendlier, they talk to each other, people in line at grocery stores realize they don’t have to be strangers and they strike up conversations.  They act as if they might could possibly be friends.

Neighbors bake banana loaf bread and take it to each other and wish good cheer.  They complement each other on how festive and elegant the decorations are on each other’s houses.

People are more generous this time of year.  Charitable organizations always count on the benevolence of people at this time of the year unlike any other to sustain their organizations.  People want to give gifts at this time of the year.  Tips are greater.  It just feels good to give.

I went to my favorite Starbucks this last week and ordered my usual “tall, bold and black drip” coffee and the cashier said that it was free.  I said that is so cool.  She said yes someone earlier had donated a gift card to buy the person following a free coffee.  She said that some people are donating money to reload the card to keep it going.  That is so cool, I said.  I never carry cash in my wallet.  But I looked to see…  That $1.80 cup of coffee ended up costing me $15.00!

People are more generous this time of year.

We open ourselves up to joy at this time of year.  We decorate stuff, bake stuff, eat stuff, —we play old Christmas Carols.  People who never sing at any other time of the year find themselves singing at Christmas.

We watch sentimental movies like Holiday Inn, It’s a Wonderful Life, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

We cherish rituals and traditions.

People get kinder at Christmas.  Old grudges are set aside.  People who are standoffish find themselves moving closer to people.  Cold and distant people find themselves getting warmer and more accepting.

We have a way of remembering what is really important and what really matters this time of year.  We miss the people we have lost, and we treasure those we have this time of year.

All of this is part of this annual glow-fest in our culture that we call “The Spirit of Christmas.”

And it says something about human beings that we even want this.  That we want to think outside of ourselves and think of others to this great extent that we will brave mall traffic to buy that special gift for a weird uncle that we don’t really even like.

But this raises a question that was put most poignantly by the great theologian Elvis Pressley in a Christmas song that we play every year at our house when he asks, “Why can’t every day be like Christmas?”

The problem with the spirit of December 25th is December 26th.  It all stops.  It never lasts.

A famous incident from WWI illustrates the nature of the Christmas season very well. It was December 1914, the first Christmas of the war. Already the stalemate along the western front in France had begun to set in. British, French and German troops faced each other in their lines of trenches. If you know anything about trench warfare, then you know it’s a nasty business: hastily dug holes in the ground about two yards deep topped with barbed wire.

Special periscopes were fixed at intervals along the front line trenches, because to stick your head above ground even for a second could easily be a fatal mistake. Artillery bombardment could come at any time, day or night, and the soldiers were in constant mortal danger, not only from enemy fire but also from the cold and disease that by the end of the war had caused more casualties than the enemy.

In between the trenches was no man’s land. It was littered with craters from artillery fire, providing a momentary safe haven for attacking troops and, later in the war, a place where the poison gas could pool and stagnate. It would be liberally strewn with barbed wire and bodies in various states of decay. If an attack was ordered, soldiers would have to go over the top through this quagmire. Many were cut down within yards of their own trenches by machine guns. That was trench warfare in the Great War.

But on Christmas Eve 1914, something strange happened. No orders were given by the commanding officers (in fact the British High Command hated the whole thing), but in Ypres in Belgium, German troops began placing candles decorating the few trees that still remained around their trenches. They sung Christmas carols, including Silent Night which was originally written in German. The English soldiers responded with their own carols.

The two sides continued shouting greetings to one another until there were invitations for visits across no man’s land. Small gifts were exchanged – whiskey, jam, chocolates. A joint funeral service was held in the middle of the battlefield, where Psalm 23 was read in English and German. In one spot a soccer game was played-–won 3-2 by the Germans, incidentally.

In one spot, a British captain climbed up on his parapet and fired three shots into the air. The German officer he had shared a beer with the previous day also rose from his trench, bowed his head to his counterpart and also fired three shots into the air. And, as the officer wrote at the time, the war was on again.  The generals and Prime ministers made certain that there was no Christmas truce the next year and for four more years they fought and killed 9 million men; a loss from which Europe has never fully recovered.

The spirit of Christmas says such wonderful things about the human heart, but it is so elusive.

Seems like such a simple thing that if we worked a little harder, if we just slowed down a little, if we just looked each other in the eye, if we just got a little more tolerant, if we were just a little kinder we could make it last.  But we have been trying a long time now and somehow we can’t.

Why can’t every day be like Christmas?

According to the writers of Scripture it is because in this world of beauty and loveliness we are plagued with a dark and sinister force called sin.

It was in those soldiers and it is in me and it is in you.  We can’t get rid of it.  We can’t educate it away, we can’t reform it away, we can’t pass laws and legislate it away, we can’t find a magic pill that makes it go away, and it is killing us.

And a sweet little holiday spirit doesn’t cut it. As author Stewart Briscoe once said, “The spirit of Christmas needs to be superseded by the Spirit of Christ.”  The spirit of Christmas is annual; the Spirit of Christ is eternal.  The spirit of Christmas is sentimental; the Spirit of Christ is supernatural.  The spirit of Christmas is a human product; the Spirit of Christ is a divine person. That makes all the difference in the world.

Jesus didn’t come to this earth to establish a holiday, but to bring His presence.  He came to this earth to teach us what life could be like and when He did that got Him into a lot of trouble with many people and He was placed on a cross when He was a young man and there He died.

And somehow on that cross all the darkness of sin broke itself on Him.  You see darkness does not overcome light.  Light always diminishes darkness.  He paid the debt of sin for us and died a death instead of us went to a grave and was raised on the third day.  And that is hope and good news for the human race.

And the last thing He ever said to His closest friends before He ascended to heaven was, “And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”

Jesus promised that he would come and take up residence in our hearts.  His presence there will change the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you live.  And that is the hope of the world.

Doesn’t mean your life will be easy.  Doesn’t mean we will all live the perfect life or even be easy to understand at times.  But it is the only hope that this stumbling, bumbling and dying human beings have that is bigger than death.

If you were honest right now I wonder if you would want to invite Jesus to be a part of your life.  More than the warm glow at Christmas or at Easter; more than a holiday kind of faith; I wonder if you might be open to letting him move in and set up residence inside your heart and life.

Maybe you have lots of questions and you’re not sure about God and Jesus and if they are even real.  Before you decide that faith in Jesus is not for you do your due diligence.  Don’t trust the opinions of your parents, or your friends or popular culture.  YOU do your own homework and see if Jesus and His claims are real.

If our church could help you with that we would love to do that.  We will begin a new study in January called The Good and Beautiful Life where we will examine in depth the kind of life Jesus came of give.  I encourage you to come and study with us.

If another church would better fit your needs then I encourage you to find one and begin to understand what it means to follow Jesus.  There are many really good Churches in the area and I can recommend a couple to you if you want to send me an email.

But don’t keep kicking the faith can down the road year after year.

Maybe you would admit that you have a relationship with Jesus but for whatever reason, you have been holding Him at arm’s length.  You and He are not as close as you once were.

Maybe you would be honest enough to say that there are some things He may want to change about you and you are not sure you want Him to change those things.

But maybe this Christmas you are feeling a shift in your values a little and you are open to a closer relationship with Jesus and you would say, “Alright, Jesus I don’t know everything that this means, but deep down in my  heart, down where the knobs are, I want you to take control of my life.  I would like to be your follower, your student; I want to know you deeply.”

Maybe there is a deep wound and disappointment in your life.  Others are happy this time of year and are filled with joy and you smile on the outside, but on the inside you are wounded and hurting.  There is regret.  There is someone you miss.  There is an ache that won’t go away and is not getting filled.  There is a prayer that keeps going unanswered.

I cannot make you a promise that tomorrow will be easier than today.  But I can tell you that the ultimate hope for our world in its darkness…the only hope that is bigger than death…is Jesus.

Someone once told a Chinese woman all about Jesus for the first time and she began to weep.  Through her tears she said, “You know I always knew there ought to be someone like Him somewhere.  I just didn’t know His name.”

Jesus is his name.

Home for Christmas

The caption on the coffee house door says, “Take comfort in rituals.”  I like that.  There are some things in this life, when done over and over again, that bring certain predictability to days filled with uncertainty.  That uncertainty can come from the economic crisis that is tightening its vice-like grip on our world.  It can come from the sharp debate in politics that turns otherwise reasoned men and women into shrill partisans more resembling petulant children than grown adults assigned to help us find our way in these confusing days.

That is why, I think, we are drawn to rituals and why holidays are vital to our health as a community.  I am remembering the song from the play Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye sings about this as the glue that holds families and communities together: Tradition!  Tradition!  Tradition!

I went to college out of state and my parents would not send me money to come home for Christmas.  Either they didn’t have it or they didn’t trust me with it.  Instead, they sent me a gas credit card; a Texaco card to be exact.  I always looked forward to mail from home when I was in college but there is nothing like getting a white envelope with a little note wrapped around a gas card that said, “Looking forward to seeing you, son.”  I remember running my fingertips over the raised numbers on that card and feeling a strong pull towards something warm, comforting, predictable, safe and reassuring…home.

I love hearing about Christmas traditions.  Our family growing up typically opened one gift on Christmas Eve, usually socks or underwear. One Christmas Eve, however, my brother and I got the board game Risk and we stayed up all night trying to capture and recapture Madagascar.  I don’t think I have played the game since.  My wife’s family always ate potato soup and hotdogs on Christmas Eve.

Today we pass one gift to one person in our family and then we all watch them open that gift to witness the joy of the perfect and deeply thoughtful gift.  Sometimes there is a puzzled look minus the joy.  Then, when enough joy has been witnessed and assimilated, greed takes over and someone shouts out, “Whose next?”

On our first Christmas together my wife went home to be with her family but I couldn’t get the time off from work so I had to stay out of state over Christmas.  Some friends let me spend Christmas with them and their family, but it wasn’t the same.  I remember how out of place I felt.  I was at someone’s home for this holiday, but not my home.  Nothing about it felt right.  Like the sun coming up in the west instead of the east, you are glad it came up, but you sure hope it goes back to normal tomorrow.

I wonder if you have ever felt like you were in the wrong place on Christmas.  Like maybe you should be home.  Maybe there could be a place for you to feel “at home.”  If you remember the story of Jesus’ birth it tells us that there was no room for him in the inn, so he had to be born in a stable and a manger.  He, too, was a long way from home on the first Christmas.  He was a long way from His second home, Nazareth and a long way from His first home, Heaven.

But Jesus always shows up where room is made for him.

Why not start a new “old” tradition this year?  If you have no place to celebrate the birth of Jesus, I invite you to come to our church for a brief candlelight celebration.  We will sing some traditional carols, hear the Christmas Story and enjoy gathering as a people who are certain that God knows our name and is waiting for us to come home.  Our service will be at 6:00 Christmas Eve at the corner of Prospect and 2nd in Old Town.

We will make room for you.