Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

I did find a job in southern California. I was to be an assistant minister at the West Covina Methodist Church, located some twenty miles from the school of theology. I would devote thirty hours a week calling on families and cultivating new members. I would join an impressive staff: senior minister, Rev. Miles Acker, minister of Christian education, Rev. Max Graham and Paul Biering, another beginning seminarian from the Northwest. The salary was slightly over half of what I was earning as a faculty member, but it included a pleasant parsonage several blocks from the church on Cherrywood Street. I was content. I was where I wanted to be.

I was the only graduate of Buhl High School to enter Idaho State College, indeed, one of a handful of young men who even went to college. So I enter alone and scared! There I was a sixteen year old walking from Ferris Hall, the freshman dorm, to classrooms around the campus wearing one of my home-made polka dot short sleeved shirts–green, yellow, or blue– tucked into my white cord trousers with rolled up cuffs. The Kid had arrived!

I was born during the Great Depression in the community of Twin Falls in Southern Idaho, surrounded by Harrys, my father, older brother, and uncle. Some would add my younger brother also, who was named Harold. Earlier I had been accustomed to saying that I was the middle of three boys until I remembered that there had been an earlier stillborn infant whose gravesite bears the simple name, Baby Brizee.

This is a story of a theology and a life and how they came together. The theology is process relational theology. It is a personal story told as clearly as I can remember.

Christmas is the season during which the whole church celebrates the theme that is most central to process theology: God’s incarnation. That God is present in us and in the world, working for our healing and growth, our direction and our comfort, our reconciliation and our redemption, is our message. The church historically has been somewhat ambivalent about how fully to affirm God’s presence in the world, sometimes limiting it to Jesus or to the church. It is to Jesus and the church, and the understanding of God that these gave us, that we owe our awareness of God’s immanence. Also in Jesus we see a distinctive, perhaps even unique, working of that presence. But the God we know through Jesus is always with us and in us whether we recognize that presence or not. We discern it and celebrate it in all people, indeed, in all living things. The awareness of God’s immanence, aided by the church’s teaching of incarnation, enables us to respond to God’s call more fully. Our faith enables God’s enlivening presence to work more strongly within us. Our understanding of incarnation strengthens our respect for all creatures, and especially for all people. The story of Jesus’ birth in a stable checks any tendency to think that God’s presence in the world supports the structures of authority and prestige than humans construct. God is present in the CEOs of great corporations. But we are called to attend in particular to God’s presence in beggars and prostitutes and lepers. ~ John B. Cobb, Jr

One of the things that has always struck me about the Christmas story is the way it is a mass of contrasts: there is squalor, and there is splendor. There is the stinkiness of the stable, and the aurora of angels. There is the violence of the Roman imperial overlords, and the peace proclaimed to God’s people on earth. There is the exclusion of the “socially unacceptable” shepherds, and the utter and ultimate inclusivity of God’s justice. There is the way Mary and Joseph are pushed off to the sidelines of things in the stable, and the way the birth of Jesus makes that stable the very center of the world. The Christmas story Luke tells us is a mass of contrasts. And I think that is why the story has such power for us; that’s why we keep coming back to it year after year after year: because our stories are masses of contrasts, too; and Luke’s story tells us that it is precisely into those contrasts that God’s embodied love always comes. God’s love isn’t just for the pious and the perfect, God’s grace doesn’t come only in moments of quiet contemplation, when everything else is all wrapped up and all settled down and all put to bed—but God’s love breaks in on us precisely when everything else is going on, precisely when everything else is chaos and commotion, precisely in those days when it is the last time and place we would expect God’s love to be: in the emergency room, in the homeless shelter; where people’s hearts are breaking, where people are struggling for justice; in the choice between war and peace, in the decision between generosity and greed; in the moment of love when everything seems loveless, in the flash of hope when everything seems hopeless, in the sudden joy that breaks through even the deepest sorrow. It is precisely into these contrasts that God’s love comes, it is precisely these contrasts God’s love holds together, just as it did in a stable in Bethlehem; and suddenly the world is hushed, and the chaos pauses for a moment, and the angel appears, and the heavenly chorus sings, and the Savior is there, and new life begins. That is the story of God’s Incarnation; those are the days in which God’s love is embodied for us. ~ Paul S. Nancarrow

The best thing I ever did was to take the newest baby in the congregation on Christmas Eve [could be any Sunday near Christmas], when no one is interested in the sermon, frankly, but the STORY says something to us . . . in some deep way. So you say, "if our story says to us that God comes to us in the form of a baby, then what does this baby say about God . . . and our relationship with God?" And they get it. You get answers like: tender . . . need to take care of each other . . . not almighty but compelling, etc. Once I did this, I did it every year.  It really makes a lovely and deeply moving—and brief!—reflection. ~ Mary Ellen Kilsby

“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:5)
This year, we will be spending Christmas day in the oncology ward with our recently married 27 year old son Matt and wife Ingrid. While other families will be unwrapping presents on Christmas morning, our son will be in the middle of what we hope will be the fourth and final cycle of five day-long chemotherapy treatments. We realize that we are not alone in facing illness and tragedy this Christmas season. Like many other parents, whether in Darfur, Iraq, Israel and Palestine, or the cancer ward, we will be experiencing the interplay of hope and fear, and light and darkness. Perhaps, our experience reflects one of the deeper truths of Christmas. Christmas embraces and transforms both light and darkness. God is present in the most unexpected places, where despair threatens to defeat hope. While we might hope for a supernatural miracle for our son, perhaps the Christmas miracle we pray for is of a different order – the miraculous truth that God is with us, sharing our lives and giving us the courage, energy, and hope to face what lies ahead. What happens to our son and our family matters, just like what happens to the child at Darfur matters, not just to loving parents, but to God, whose love embraces “the hopes and fears of all the years.” This year, we will give thanks and light candles of hope because God is truly with us, not just on Christmas but in every moment of light and darkness. ~ Bruce Epperly

It’s a familiar image: mother and child. I’m looking at one now on my computer. She is looking down to the sleeping child cradled in her arms. It is the image we contemplate at Christmas. So far away, yet so close. It’s the look on Mary’s face, and Sarah’s, and many other women in the Bible. The look on the mother’s face reveals little; it’s a private moment. We are left to imagine deep connections being made in the gaze of the mother. After all those months of waiting, gestating, slowly growing in secret, anxiety mixed with anticipation, something new emerges from darkness into light. It reminds me of the story Jesus used to explain how God’s power works in the world: “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how.” (Mark 4:26 & 27) We’re told that God works in dark places like tombs and wombs: that’s where new life comes out of death, a result of the quiet transforming power of God. We gaze upon the child and remind ourselves of how God creates new life so quietly, secretly, surprisingly. We sleep, we rise, we all gaze at something that grows, we know not how. The image of mother and child becomes an expression of the mystery of hope. It is an icon of faith. But this Christmas is different for me, because the image on my computer is the first picture of my daughter looking into the face of her daughter born day before yesterday. So far away, yet so close. All I can do is gaze upon the mother gazing upon the child who is sleeping in the arms of the mystery of God’s creating, transforming power. I am reduced to a state of silent wonder . . . again. ~ Rick Marshall

This very week, a week that included lighting the first Advent candle, I learned of two friends who received diagnoses of metastatic cancer. One was told by her doctor to “go home, sell your house and travel.” The other, who had been assured that her cancer was one that had a high “cure” rate, was told that there was no internal organ that had not been affected by the cancer and that there was very little more that could be done. My friends lit advent candles this week, as well. Sometimes our exegesis and exposition sounds so lofty and airy. Other times it can come off as predictable—clichéd, even. And I am as participant in that irrelevancy as anyone else. But for me the power of the season, as well as the power of process thought rests not in our words, or even our deeds, for that matter, but in our experience. The season asks us to get inside of our experience, not just talk about it or interpret it—which alters it, but simply be inside our experience. To be inside our experience is to understand that merely repeating the stories of our spiritual ancestors, or rehearsing rituals in their honor, or clinging to our own traditions, how ever precious they might be, is not the same as living our experience. For me, this year, my living experience will be enlarged by two friends who are pressing through the bleak mid-winter of dire news to light advent candles trusting that their vulnerabilities and God’s meet in the birth of the infant Jesus. Rejoice! ~ Tari Lennon

"And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night."
Luke 2:8
Sometimes we know the most about God, when we know the least about God. Imagine you are a shepherd, alone on a dark and starlit night, keeping watch over your sheep. All is calm and all is bright. You feel small but included in a larger whole that you can never grasp but always trust. This larger whole is not a star among the stars; and yet all the stars are enveloped in its sky-like embrace. Suddenly an angel appears and says that the something beautiful has been revealed in a small child, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. You make your way to Bethlehem to see this child, and when you look into his eyes, you see your own reflection. You realize that you were present in the baby even before you arrived, and he in you, too. You suspect that when the baby grows up, he may feel called to help people understand this, to understand just how connected we all are. Eventually you make your way back home. You are standing again in the field, keeping watch over your flock. The night is calm and bright. A friend walks up to you and ask where you’ve been. You say: "I was in Bethlehem.” He asks: "What did you see?” You say: "I saw the world’s best hope.” He asked what it looked like. You say: "It looks like you and me.” ~ Jay McDaniel

What we find in the message of the Christmas story is the idea that the Sacred, the Spirit of Love, is incarnate in the world; incarnate in that most profound symbol of new life, of possibilities, of hope—in a child. This was not a once and only event. The incarnation of Love was the very creation of the beginning of time—it happened before the birth of Jesus, it happened then, and is happening now. It is present and active in all things and all people—at all times and everywhere. Wherever hope abides amidst despair; wherever joy abides amidst sorrow; wherever love abides amidst hate; wherever peace is spoken amidst war; Love is happening there. This is a compelling truth of the story. This is what the child announces to us. In this time and this place, for us and for all beings—a love at once particular and universal draws us to a life peace and hope. We gather with friends and family at Christmas to be inspired by the possibility that in a time of rampant war-making the idea of peace on earth and good will toward all may become more than a slogan, may somehow take hold. For this is the time of the year that we most dare dream of renewal and peace, most dare to hope boldly. Let us know that Love whispers to us all, in every breath calling us to remember that each night is holy and all life is sacred. ~ Beth Johnson