Liminality

This Christmas I was moved by the words of Frederick Buechner.  For my last blog of the year I offer to you his wisdom rather than my own ramblings.  I hope it does for you what it continues to do for me. Frederick Buechner says in his book The Faces of Jesus: On the dark bulwark of Elsinore, Shakespeare has Marcellus and Haratio reflecting on Christ in the opening scene of Hamlet: Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, No fairly takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallowed and so gracious is the time These lines from the first scene of Hamlet in a sense say it all.  We tend to think time is just progression . . . as moment following moment, day following day, in relentless flow, the kind of time a clock or calendar measures.  But we ...

I once had a professor ask during class presentations, “What story gets repeated over and over by the collective conscious of our country?  When families or communities gather to tell stories . . . which one always gets told?” We spent several minutes tossing out ideas.  We thought maybe the American dream . . . people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps . . . is a retold narrative.  But that doesn’t really work.  Maybe the Pledge of Allegiance?  Everyone knows it but it’s not really a narrative.  Perhaps Santa Claus is a consistent narrative . . . but not even it bears the weight of our poly-cultural world.  Finally, we though Billy Graham . . . our world can stand and tell a story of how they were sinful and then set right, how they walked the aisle, how they joined the church.  But then we quickly remembered that not everyone in America is Christian and the youth today unfortunately don’t know who Billy Graham is.  So we conc...

My wife and I went looking at Christmas lights last Christmas. We saw the usual carolers, snowmen, nutcrackers, reindeers, sleighs and so forth. At one particular house, we saw two things I'll never forget. The first was a birthday cake covered in white lights. Green lettering spelled out "Happy Birthday Jesus." The theologian in me cringed for fear of the message being sent with this cake, but all in all I thought it was a cute gesture. Jesus did have a birthday, and whether it was during the winter solstice is probably irrelevant. I still hesitate, though, representing Jesus' birth so casually. What got me more than the birthday cake – what set me off as a theologian and still more as a Christian – was that standing beside the cake was a white baby Jesus lying in a manger with St. Nick overlooking him. The image was irresponsible, unbiblical and an unfortunate step backward for all the churches trying to separate the enmeshed imagery of Santa...

Human perception embraces  ideas  about reality.  People see a water bottle and then construct a reality about the essence of what the water bottle should be. The problem, however, is that people’s perception is not always correct. But it’s not necessarily our fault.  We collect our data, analyze it and perceive the best possible conclusions on life, faith, love and reality only to find we didn't have enough data.  There’s more to the story we didn't know.  And that’s where conflict arises – when we find out we don’t have enough data.  That’s probably what Mary and Joseph thought when they went to Jerusalem on a donkey.  They went on faith they’d have a place to sleep.  They went on faith they’d be taken care of.  But there wasn’t a place to stay.  They weren’t taken care of.  They had to leave town.  They fought hard to get to Bethlehem and find an Inn Keeper still awake. But the ...