It's Christmas...I love the Christmas season. Lights, trees, the Grinch, snow...I love it. But there is a dark underbelly to the season. We clean everything up...dress is up on the surface, putting on our nostalgic emotional facade...to pretend like everything is fine. All is well with the world. We even dress up the Christmas story. Ever see the nativity scenes people put out? Nice, peaceful, Mary and Joseph...pleasant looking Shepherds...the baby Jesus sleeping soundly...clean straw...you get the picture. Once I asked my high school students, many of whom were farmers, what was missing. They smiled...and you know what they said. I'm sure the cattle weren't just "lowing".
This was exam week at Dordt College, and I just finished grading essay questions and papers. Now don't get me wrong, there are many thoughtful students at Dordt and I read many thoughtful and interesting essays. But these creative engagements were mixed in with quite a bit of bull$#&t. Christianity nice and neatly packaged. Everything figured out..."t's" crossed and "i's" dotted. Gumball Christianity...put in a quarter and out comes the answer...without much thought at all. I really don't blame the students...many of them have been trained to think about faith in this way. Through many years of schooling and indoctrination...we are trained to spit out answers even if our lives reflect we believe very little of what we say to be true.
So what's my point? The Luke narrative of Christ's birth penetrates through the bull$#&t if we let it. "In the days of Cesar Augustus...", in other words, in the days of the son of the gods is born the Son of God. Luke tells is as it is...in the midst of misery, oppression, and exile...in the middle of a dark cave rank with animal waste...a child is born. He has come to deal with the messiness, to enter into it, in order to do away with it. He surely hasn't come to dress it up a little and pretend everything is fine. What we need this Christmas season is honesty...seeing the world as it is...seeing ourselves as we truly are. Only then will we be able to make sense of the hope and peace God brings in the Christ child.
2 comments:
Hmm... interesting insight to a very true topic. It is amazing the words that we can come up with huh? The question I have though is how much of the bull$#&t that you speak of it truths of Christianity, how much of the bull$#&t is stuff that we think sounds good, or how much of the bull$#&t is stuff that we are simply regurgitating from class? Not to say that I have gotten bull$#&t from you, actually your class was the most "truth filled" I feel than any other. However, many of the classes that I have gone through, well... I think you know. The fact of the matter is students spout bull so that they don't have to think in order to get the A. I believe that you frustrations are true... I just hope that they don't get the best of you as you continue your teaching career. I sure have appreciated your class, and I hope I wasn't one of those students. ;)
Friday's chapel was about exactly this. Minus the "bullshit." Take that however you like.
Sort of a shocker that the gospel written to the Jews is the one to mention pagan, idol worshiping astrologers who found "their" messiah with horoscopes.
Did I pick up a hint of N.T. Wright in that one?
no. 2. I thought we'd been over this: the closest cows are up in the Golan. The land in Judea doesn't support that size of an animal. Too rocky. Not enough grass. Not that it didn't smell. But rather than "bullshit," I think it was more likely "donkeyshit."
Shalom. Agape.
Amos
Post: looks like Iowa dealt with Mitt Romney and Hilary in a positive way. I may not be the biggest fan of Huckabee, but how about Chuck Norris--just think if he were vice president. "In international news, Vice President Chuck Norris drop kicked Columbia." Yeah Obama!
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