Author Archives: hummingbird

“I’m pregnant!”

The announcement demands a response. At times the response is easy: There are hugs and cheers, whoops, whirls, and texts—the group kind. At times the response is complicated: There are glances and glares, winces, wails, and tears—not the good kind.

When a baby is a dream come true, the announcers set to painting a room, taking vitamins, writing letters, scheduling appointments, arranging photos, and purchasing a range of clothes…and bins—lots of bins—to house the clothes. The list feels endless. A baby is the natural tangible expression of marital love. Pregnancy is welcome news.

Tragically, a baby may be the opposite of a dream come true. For some, a baby may be a nightmare. Far from an expression of marital love, a baby may be evidence of secret infidelity, sexual abuse, rape, and impulsive action. Pregnancy may not feel like a delight, but a verdict.

Whether welcome or wished-it-wasn’t-so, a baby is revealing. The baby brings revealing light to the emotional strength, financial capacity, planning ability, and relational health of a life. A baby reveals the order (or chaos) of a house. A baby reveals a home’s priorities and values. Trying to welcome a baby into life and home without making adjustments is impossible. You can’t ignore the baby. There is new work, new responsibilities, and new demands.

While the Annunciation, Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she will conceive a child by the Holy Spirit, reminds Christians that a baby is on his way, Advent provides a time of preparation for his arrival. No longer can important tasks be put off. He’s on his way. Like expectant parents, churches and church members focus on making announcements, building floats, practicing and performing dramas, purchasing and distributing gifts. But we ought not ignore everything that Jesus’ birth revealed. It was not taken as easy celebration but as serious news. His birth could not be treated neutrally. Just as a baby reveals the state of the home, so did Jesus’ birth reveal the state of his world.

• Just as a baby reveals the home’s priorities, Jesus’ birth forces us to attend to our priorities. His birth exposes idolatry—the sin of placing anything before God. Do the priorities in our lives reflect God’s primacy in our love and devotion? Just as a baby must be loved in proper order, so must God order everything else in our lives.
•  Just as a baby cannot be ignored in its home, Jesus’ birth forces us to attend to the rhythm of our lives. His birth exposes our folly—the sin of crafting a life without God. Have we ignored God? How have we constructed lives without God?
• Just as a baby brings new responsibilities and work, Jesus’ birth forces us to attend to our willingness to do the work given us by God. His birth exposes our penchant to sloth—the sin of refusing our God-given work. Are we giving our best to the work done by the will of God? Are we taking up our divinely ordered tasks?

Just as baby reveals my life’s priorities, constructions, and discipline, so does the birth of Jesus offer a judgment on my idolatry, folly, and sloth. Advent gives me time to prepare for that judgment.

Judgment on idolatry, folly, and sloth? No wonder people might not consider the birth of this baby Good News! But it actually is. If you have ever lived in a home, worked in an organization, invested in a community, or had a meaningful partnership that was marked with disorder, intentional ignorance, and laziness, then you know that judgment is, possibly, Good News. Proper judgment establishes order, wisdom, and meaningful work.

But the news of order, wisdom, and work is only good news if the one bringing judgment is of a certain character. The form taken in the manger reveals to us the heart of the judge. He would grow to be the one who would weep these prophetic words of warning, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate” (Matt. 23:37-38a). He weeps because Jesus’ words have a finality. His warnings have not been heeded and the ultimate symbol of his judgment will be the destruction of the temple as predicted in the very next chapter, Matthew 24.

But while the temple will be brought down, the personal houses of the disciples may still be guarded. “Keep watch!” “Stay awake!” or even “Wake up!” commands Jesus (Matt. 24:42). May your house be found in order! Advent is not simply an invitation to set our houses in order for his birth. Advent is an urgent opportunity to set our houses in order for Jesus’ return. By taking the opportunity to rightly order our lives, we may anticipate the glorious return of Jesus joyfully. His coming judgment will not be feared if we accept his present judgment against idolatry, folly, and sloth—even our own.

The liturgical calendar, in its wisdom, has given us Advent, complete with its call to prepare for judgment. Advent is like an alarm clock. The alarm clock’s obnoxious noise is not bad news! If properly set and attended, the alarm clock wakes us up to keep our lives well ordered, to keep us on time. The alarm clock is not bad news; it is the opportunity to prepare. Advent’s warning of judgment is not bad news; it is the opportunity to prepare for Christ’s return. Advent is an annual alarm clock, set to go off and remind us that a baby is coming and so we must be prepared. The baby will reveal the state of our house.

And if we prepare, then just as many heard the news of his birth as gospel, so will we anticipate his return with similar hope. Advent’s alarm clock is ringing. Are you awake? Are you alert?

There is a moment you stand on the brink, or the brink stands on you. The inexorable draw pulls you in, like gravity, like the current; at the moment you must fight to get away or be drawn in forever, you are the most tempted to pause with quickened breath as you weigh whether the knowledge of what lies on the other side is worth the possibility of your own extinction – before you can say what it is you’ve seen.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”

In the quest to see the truth, what if you are blinded? Is a blind woman happy who has lost her sight in order to bear witness to the Beatific vision? Would terrorist Saul have chosen blindness and disorientation to see Christ, or did Christ need to blind Saul temporarily so that he would perceive properly?

Today is an odd moment in human history; scientists have collaborated across continents, in multiple time zones, to set up equipment on the world’s mountains so that humanity can use plastic, metal, and glass tools that fit in your pocket or sit on your desk to communicate with each other almost instantaneously and see images of a black hole. Computing isn’t identical to information and information isn’t identical to knowledge, but today you can pull out a piece of equipment, use a high-powered search engine, type the words, “black hole photo,” and see the results of decades of hard work. Just 150 years ago people learned of the death of their loved one in the U.S. Civil War by checking the newspaper or receiving a letter from the dead person’s friend. It could take weeks, months. Now a mystery in our galaxy is viewable on the rechargeable machine in your pocket.

Black holes are mesmerizing, terrifying, and little understood. Using math, calculations, formulas, equations, scientists guess. What appears to be true is that, in a way, light itself can be sucked down the drain and condensed into a tiny, heavy ball with extraordinary gravitational pull. (Note: this is an inaccurate description of a complex reality by someone who is not a scientist.) What science fiction writers like to play with is the moment – the event horizon – in which light or matter (or a fictional character) can no longer escape the gravitational pull.

You still have time you still have time you still have time it’s too late.

Who can rescue you from knowledge that will be your undoing? No rescue craft can hover at the event horizon, lowering a rope to you.

How can knowledge burn but set you free? There is a knowing that singes you to breaking point, then propels you forward.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
    and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
    the night will shine like the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.

Light, we are told, cannot escape the power of a black hole.

Perhaps not.

Or at least, perhaps not for a long, long time, until that condensed matter explodes outward – propelling, igniting, cascading.

Jesus swallowed up the darkness that appeared to swallow him. The darkness came close; the darkness thought that Jesus Christ stood on the event horizon, and fell in.

On this mountain he will destroy
    the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
    he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
    from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
    from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken. – Isaiah 25:7-8

What is Holy Week about? It is about Jesus letting himself be drawn into a black hole. It is about the sky going dark, the earth shaking. It is about hours of eerie silence – hours and hours. It is about hope vanishing in the blink of an eye.

It is about a black hole quivering. It is about a black hole beginning to get smaller. It is about the Light of the World swallowing the heavy darkness with such inescapable draw that the darkness cannot escape. It is about the Light of the World entering a hole of black darkness and absorbing it from the inside.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Standing on the brink, looking into the abyss, Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate stood.

The inexorable draw pulls you in, like gravity, like the current; at the moment you must fight to get away or be drawn in forever, you are the most tempted to pause with quickened breath as you weigh whether the knowledge of what lies on the other side is worth the possibility of your own extinction – before you can say what it is you’ve seen.

What does it feel like to betray the Light? Judas held that knowledge. So too did Pilate. And it swallowed them whole as they were consumed by the ever-hungry darkness.

Standing on the brink, looking into the abyss, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, Mary Magdalene, and other women stood, peering into an open, empty, echoing tomb. Comprehension failed them. Lightning-colored beings shouted nearby from an eternity away. Fight or flight kicked in. Hope is deadly, and they did not want to die.

At the moment you must fight to get away or be drawn in forever, you are the most tempted to pause with quickened breath as you weigh whether the knowledge of what lies on the other side is worth the possibility of your own extinction.

Had Light escaped the darkness?

What does it feel like to witness the Light? Mary and Joanna held that knowledge. So too did Magdalene. And it swallowed them whole as they were consumed by the ever-lifegiving Light.

It is not the brink that is the problem; it is not the cliff’s edge, the event horizon; it’s whether you’re jumping into darkness or into Light. Holy Week brings us to the brink, reminds us of what it feels like to peer over the edge into humanity’s bent toward self-destruction, pushes us toward letting go of all safety railings as we free-fall into the Light of the World.

Featured image courtesy Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/National Science Foundation.

Note from the Editor: As we ready for Lent, we offer this reflection from 2016.

We are too removed from ash.

Our furnaces soil our hands only as much as a stray clump of dust falls from the filter when we wrinkle our nose and change it with another high-efficiency, allergen-reducing plane of fibers designed to keep our lives clean.

Maybe there’s a stray bonfire, an occasional fireplace mess that dirties our palms or leaves a smudge – extra, chosen warmth for recreational purposes.

If you and I see ash it’s usually on the news, somewhere far away: the 90’s business women with ash around their noses and mouths, the result of breathing in smoke, emerging from the first foreboding basement bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. The dusty, sooty cheeks and noses and foreheads of the bombed and shot-at and chased in Other Parts Of The World as loved ones are pulled limp from rubble. The dazed eyes crinkled in old war photos, peering stark from ash and dirt, smoke-caked faces hiding shell shock.

Lucky us. We get to choose our ash.

Why has ash become #chic? Growing up only the old-school Catholics wore it on their heads and my child eyes tried hard not to stare. “What is Ash Wednesday?”, pointing to the calendar, asking a parent. “A Catholic holiday,” I was told, until our denomination started observing “40 Days of Prayer and Fasting,” and a blink and a few boy bands and technological advances later and there are ashes to go, there are people who never go to church bending and asking for dirty foreheads, what?

As recently as 1941 the President wore a black arm band when his mother died. What is this impulse for a mark of sorrow, grief, repentance, confession? Why are strangers at train stations asking for this? In our culture that let black arm bands of mourning drift down to the floor, an old practice, a dated practice to be left by the wayside?

Complaint or neuroses or hoarding or entitlement all cover one thing: call it sadness or terror or emptiness or grief, it’s behind the rant at the employee or the compulsive behavior or longing for attention. Mother Teresa spent so much time in dirt and recognized the sadness in North America. She called it a poverty of love.

Oh, God, love – it hurts. It hurts to want to be loved. It hurts to refuse or betray love. It hurts to lose love. And the pastor or priest bending with blackened thumb and murmuring says, I see your pain. It is recognized. Today others will see it too. You have a chance. Love Made Flesh bleeds for you.

Communal grief is necessary. You might stumble on a rare wake among Irish Catholics, or a Jewish family sitting shiva. For the most part grief has become privatized, something you discuss with a therapist and hide away from the world – unless you sink down into it, let it engulf you, put it in album form and earn a deal with a record label.

Maybe we get to choose our ash. But we don’t get to choose our grief. No President can carry it away, no amount of veganism can remove our guilt, no amount of safe space can really protect us. You play Candy Crush or sew a new quilt or join a fantasy football league or secretly read Fifty Shades of Grey or join a club, anything to distract, but we all close our eyes at night, trying to go to sleep. And whatever you try to numb during waking hours comes to life.

Do not feed after midnight…

I’ve been waiting for this day, ever since two days before Christmas, when weeks of wrapping paper and pain and the Grinch and blood finally contracted into finality, and I avoided looking at my beloved nativity set because Mary had her baby, and mine, mine was lost, the heartbeat ended.

Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel – born is the King of Israel.

My favorite time of year screeching out of control, the beautiful depth of the liturgical calendar and Advent and hang on, little buddy, is it a boy or girl? Then the baby is gone, missing from the manger. Two children up at six on Christmas morning, starry-eyed and bouncing and laughing. I smile and laugh, turn my head, try to hide the grimace of pain, the tears rolling hot.

Chunks of grace, substantive and heavy, held the doors of our souls open. A girl named Micah wrote this, published it just a couple of days after Christmas when I was sure there was nothing in a devotional email pertaining to an Advent miscarriage.

I’ve been waiting for this day, this thundercloud of a day on the horizon of church life, when liturgy would finally match my insides. I do not want a sunny day when I’m sad.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

From dust you come, to dust you shall return. Repent and believe the Gospel.

Your body is feeble. Every life involves pain.

Today we acknowledge it.

And we confess not only our frailty but our hope that blood, ash, and tears do not have the last word. In Revelation, blood and smoke and tears can indicate new life.

And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people. And they sang a new song, saying:

“You are worthy to take the scroll
    and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
    and with your blood you purchased for God
    persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.
You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
    and they will reign on the earth.”

“Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!”

We are dust without you, God. Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…

Make us new creatures. We can’t live this life without you.

Amen.

The statement on the website shouted loudly and clearly what many people instinctively know if they let themselves notice it: The Key to Relieving Pain Is Fixing Our Misalignment.

I was visiting a website that sells therapeutic insoles for people with aching feet. The promises of pain relief were backed up by “Science” and a compelling founder’s story from a man who just wanted his little boy to be able to play and run with his friends again. Most insoles give you cushioning, the site explained. But these insoles realign your ankles, counteracting the chain reaction that occurs when your ankles are misaligned. When your ankles are misaligned, your knees, hips, lower and upper back, and neck are all thrown out of alignment too. Align your ankles, though, and the other joints are restored to proper positioning.

The Key to Relieving Pain is Fixing Our Misalignment.

Look around, and you will find pain everywhere. An announcement goes out from a friend on social media who has just had five siblings placed in her foster home: clothing, car seats, basic toys are needed. What pain preceded the moment they arrived on her doorstep, children walking into a stranger’s home?

A regional newspaper announces a workshop on how to administer Narcan, a drug that can halt an opioid overdose, potentially saving the life of an unconscious drug addict. Deaths have skyrocketed, and people beyond EMTs and first responders are learning how to stock and use the medication.

There is, Mother Teresa said, a poverty of love. “The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”

We think we do not love each other enough. In part, we are right. Why can we not welcome each other? How has the tone of our words become so strained, sudden, explosive? Most people in North America do not buy a semiautomatic rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and drive to a nightclub to shoot and kill people; but our words are high-caliber. Accusations are unloaded, pop, pop, pop. We hear someone’s words and take aim at their character instead of their reasoning, like a trainee on a shooting course who pulls the trigger at a pop-up of a civilian instead of a combatant.

We need love, we think. We need more love. We need to be more loving as people, toward other people. But this is like saying that we need more cushioning; we need more support. And while we do need more cushioning, the key to relieving pain is fixing our misalignment. Because we are not only impoverished in love; our loves are disordered, out of alignment. We can attempt to cushion them as much as we want; only realigning misplaced joints will relieve the pain, though.

There is misalignment in all our lives. Over a millenium and a half ago, a North African Christian thinker named Augustine diagnosed the nature of human disorder by thoroughly handling our propensity for disordered loves. The essence of virtue, wrote Augustine, is rightly ordered love. For Augustine, the problem is not that we don’t love each other enough; it is that we don’t love God enough:

“But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.”

Centuries later, C.S. Lewis parsed this out: “You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.” Cushion the stride as much as you want: beginning with love for others does not address the fundamental misalignment. The right ordering of loves is essential for an aligned Body.

But you cannot love whom you cannot know.

To love means to know: not to know comprehensively – what finite mortal can comprehend God – but to know truly, truthfully, in reality, even if it is a tiny sliver of reality. If God is so transcendent as to be genuinely unknowable, then we cannot love God: God is too other to interact with. If God is so imminent as to be the same as all created matter, then we cannot love God: God is as finite as a summer dandelion. If all is only mystery, or if all is accessible and comprehensible, then we have the same problem: a God unknowable, or a God not worth knowing.

John 1 throws open a window on the Great Realigning. The universe was created in alignment, we read. But it did not recognize the one who created it, through the depth of its own injurious misalignment.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth… No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”

A God we can know is a God we can love. In loving God as the highest, greatest good, as Augustine would say, we find alignment: here, there is relief from pain. Here, where the sequence is adjusted. Here, the alignment of creation stands in sound wholeness. Here, we can now love our fellow-creature fully: because we love the Creator first. Our joints are rightly ordered, and our stride is sure and strong.

But what mercy is there in observing someone with a dislocated shoulder and offering ice for the rest of their lives? The agony of being out of socket is considerable. The arm is useless. The pain is blinding. We can place a cushion behind the joint that is out of socket, but we know that ultimately the key to relieving pain is fixing the misalignment. The short-term gasp of agony at resetting a dislocated shoulder is a mercy compared to the long-term pain and loss of use.

The right ordering of what has been out of alignment, dislocated, or out of whack is strange and painful at first. We have become accustomed to low-level pain that slowly increased until more and more energy was spent ignoring it; there is disequilibrium in the corrected stride. Proper alignment feels odd when we had learned to cope around dysfunction.

There was a time in my twenties when I attempted to jog around an indoor track while holding my then-boyfriend’s hand, a sweet but silly attempt. It became more challenging as I became aware that he was limping from a knee strain, and the limp made it impossible to match his uneven stride. If I continued to hold his hand, in order to match strides and not have our arms bang into each other, I had to adopt a limping stride too – but that was not good for my own legs. If we wanted to jog while holding hands, our strides would have to match; I would have to adopt the dysfunction of his knee, or else continue to abruptly bump into each other. Needless to say, we stopped the attempt at holding hands: our strides could not align unless I adopted an unhealthy one to match his injury.

We know there is misalignment in our world; everywhere we look, we see pain.

Where, today, is there misalignment in the Body of Christ? Where is the Body exhibiting a limp? What misalignment in an ankle is sending a cascade of disorder through the whole?

Each tradition must answer for itself; across the Body of Christ around the world, there are places of solid health and wholeness, and there are places of systemic dysfunction and injury. Places where limps were being concealed have been revealed in spectacular dismay, like a runner whose hamstring snaps in front of millions.

Christians believe that we cannot fix our misalignment ourselves, as much as we humans like to try to grit our teeth and force a bulging shoulder back into socket. We believe that rightly ordered love only results from God first loving us and making the heart of the Trinity known to us through Christ, the Word Made Flesh. We believe that the power of the Holy Spirit aligns our unstable hearts that are “bent toward sinning” – “prone to wander, Lord I feel it – prone to leave the God I love.” We believe that in Christ, we find the great aligner, who can reset what is out of joint in our lives, in our world, in our universe. There is pain in the reset, but peace in our steps as we look forward to a day when entropy – decline into disorder – is halted, and sound wholeness prevails.

“But, speaking the truth in love, may [we] grow up in all things into him who is the head—Christ—  from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love. This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God…”

Gently, the Apostle Paul says, disentangle yourselves from a stride which causes you to limp. The Body of Christ is not meant to adopt misalignment or to be a means of dysfunction in a world of entropy: rather, it is meant to grow up in all things into Christ, by whom the whole body causes growth when joined and knit together by what every joint supplies.

Christ, in your mercy, fix our misalignment; Christ, in your mercy, fix our misalignment, order our loves by centering our hearts on you, and relieve our pain.

Featured image: Sketch of a Foot, Vincent van Gogh

Note from the Editor: Enjoy this reflection on the Incarnation from our archives.

Revelation.

Not of the contents of a carefully wrapped box in your childhood home, hidden from view until enterprising siblings helped you spy out the contents (or were you one of the professional tape-peelers who could lift a flap of wrapping paper without leaving a trace?).

Not of a painful holiday discovery, realizing your daughter has an eating disorder or your sister has cancer or Uncle Joe isn’t who everyone thought he is.

Not of the extravagant new church cantata, rehearsed over months and performed under spotlights in matching robes to an audience in green and red.

Christmas is a revelation, one that trumps even North American preoccupation with the Book of Revelation and end times, because Christmas is Word-Made-Flesh and in him was life and light. And what we know about Christ’s second coming is always framed in what we know of Christ’s first coming, of who Christ is revealed to be through the incarnation, Emmanuel, God with us. We have seen the careful braiding of a whip in the temple, we have seen the mud smeared on a blind man’s eyes, we have seen the gentle drawing in the dirt as a woman shivers and shakes while her accusers drop their rocks, we have seen friends’ gush of tears as they demand, “if you had been here, our brother would not have died,” we have seen the crazed man stumbling naked among the tombs and sitting dressed and in his right mind, we have seen a piercing glance towards Simon’s eyes across a courtyard, we have seen the stumble and fall in blood and sweat and the Cyrene who carried Christ’s instrument of torture and death (what a strange brotherhood).

Who is God? Emmanuel, Word-Made-Flesh, Jesus Christ the fully divine, fully mortal. And the Book of Revelation is understood through Emmanuel, God with us, who makes all things new – new, say, as a newborn, fists tight, eyes blinking, with that delicious newborn smell and tiny tufts of hair.

Our world needs to be new again: reborn, pressed against the chest of its Creator. Do galaxies have a newborn smell? Do subatomic particles dance with the hard-to-predict movements of a newborn’s kicking legs? In the youth of the world, did the trees yawn the contented sigh of a just-nursed newborn?

The earth needs swaddling cloths. How can we be young again? Innocent like a newborn baby? How can we go back, before terrorism or Rwandan genocide or Vietnam or the Holocaust or Hiroshima or the Spanish flu or mustard gas or humans bought and sold or the plague or Mongolian war chiefs or the crusades or martyrs or Hebrew slaves in Egypt or Cain and Abel…how old and jaded the human race feels sometimes.

All things new: our world needs to be new again, but not by going back. We can’t be young again, returning to childhood, peeling tape away from the edge of Rudolph wrapping paper, Citizen Kane whispering, “Rosebud…” How can a man be born again? Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time? “See, I am making all things new:”

See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”                                                               And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

What do we want for Christmas? A set of swaddling cloths for the world, newborn and blinking. Mercifully, we’ve gotten a peek at the cosmic birth narrative through the birth of Jesus Christ and the unveiling of the new birth of the cosmos in the Book of Revelation.

Meanwhile, enjoy your set of tiny jams or a crisp new pair of flannel pajamas with relished contentment, and let hope be born in your heart today.

Recently, I noted someone online putting forward the idea that God blesses organizations, traditions, or denominations depending on their public positions on certain topics, or that God retracts a blessing on an organization, tradition, or denomination, if they do not issue a public position on one of a number of topics.

Let’s delve into some of the assumptions here and see what we find.

As a general statement, we can assert that New Testament language generally speaks in terms of the power and anointing of the Holy Spirit more than God sending or retracting “blessing” to particular endeavors. So, for instance, I might say that an endeavor may or may not be Spirit-led or Spirit-filled, or that it may or may not bear the marks of the Holy Spirit. All of these traits are fleshed out throughout the Gospels and Epistles: we see what it means to be Christlike (which is the purpose of being Spirit-filled), and we see what the Spirit-filled life looks like (“to live is Christ, to die gain”) and what it does not (“I plead with Euodia and Syntyche – please, be of one mind!!”).

However, we’re no longer living the dynamic threaded throughout the Old Testament of interacting with Yahweh through Abrahamic or Mosaic covenant language that structures how the people of God can know they are living in accordance with Yahweh. Quite often, when we talk about God’s blessings, that is what we’re saying: God’s blessing shows we are following God’s commands, and if we follow God’s commands, we will get certain blessings. There’s a fairly straightforward cause-effect assumption. Covenantal language borrowed heavily from suzerain-vassal treaty language of the Ancient Near East, in which terms of an agreement were set forth: if you will do this, I will do that. Here are the expectations; here are the consequences. Sometimes, in Old Testament wisdom literature, there were also descriptive if not prescriptive statements: the wise person who does this will be blessed, but the foolish person who does that will be cursed.

With the birth of Jesus, Word made flesh, God gave the world flesh and blood revelation of the nature and heart of God. The Messiah, foretold by many prophets found in the pages of the Old Testament, came to fulfill the law of the old covenant and to set in motion a new covenant. On the day of the crucifixion, an earthquake shook Jerusalem, and the thick woven curtain in the temple was torn: things changed irrevocably. With the ascension of Christ, disciples waited in prayer for the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost and was not contained in the Holy of Holies in the old tabernacle or the constructed temple, but enlivened every believer, male and female. The old priesthood, the whole temple system, was shattered.

We aren’t called or commanded to receive blessing; we’re called and commanded to be like Jesus through the Holy Spirit, and sometimes the results don’t look like blessing – shipwrecked, beaten, disowned, beheaded. How does that look like blessing, favor, best practices, or church growth?

How can you know you’re following God? Many ways. But attempting to measure whether you have the blessing of God by looking at outward indicators is like asking if your spouse is upset with you by looking at your car dashboard for clues- the RPMs are normal, no check engine light, full tank – my spouse must be happy with me. But of course we know your car dash illustrates the health of your car but doesn’t actually indicate whether you have the good favor of your spouse this morning.

To think that God will withdraw blessing assumes that we had a blessing to begin with; and that usually assumes that we had it because we were doing everything “right.” What then do we do when we do everything right but things go poorly? Like Job? Like Stephen, who was martyred while a young Saul stood by watching?

We aren’t able to dictate or control what we perceive as God’s blessing. Otherwise, innocent children wouldn’t get cancer; Christians wouldn’t get martyred. Yet both do. But that’s not evidence of a lack of God’s blessing on them. And a theological position isn’t insurance against hardship or struggle; believing certain things or doing all the right things will not ensure circumstances will go well.

You will be hard-pressed to find places where the Apostle Paul wrote, “and then God removed his blessing from you and your church shriveled up.” Paul was confrontational on a host of issues to be sure, but he always drove them back to a call to stick to the teachings of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. When Paul deals with problems in churches, it’s a call to be holy in Jesus through the Spirit; but there’s always room for change and repentance, not a positional or fatalistic decree that Ephesus is doomed because they sinned and lost God’s blessing.

Where blessing language is transactional, Spirit language is transformational.

Where blessing language depends a lot on cause and effect – “I/We did this, therefore God will give/remove what I discern as marks of his blessing” – Spirit language invites us to grow and transform to become like Jesus. Rather than ask whether a denomination or Christian tradition or organization “has God’s blessing,” we can ask, “does it bear marks of being Spirit-filled? Spirit-led? Does it bear the fruits of the Holy Spirit?”

I want to be part of movements that are Spirit-led; but I hesitate ever to claim that orthodox theology and biblically shaped ethics and sound practice will result in church growth. Why? Because of what I know of church history. A church may have beautiful theology and biblical ethics and robust worship yet shrink. But it doesn’t matter: we pursue the truth of Triune theology and biblical ethics and robust worship anyway. One plants, another waters – but God gives the increase.

Leaving one group and joining another will not mean your ministry will be blessed or that your church will grow. Because it might not. And that’s okay. We’re not called or commanded to pursue God’s blessing, we’re called and commanded to pursue Jesus Christ and live in the power of the Holy Spirit. And when we do that the blessings that come may not be marked by an outward litmus test of divine favor but may appear in the midst of hardship – joy unspeakable and full of glory. We cannot substitute attempts to direct outcomes for the presence and power of Christ.

If you take a public position, what then? Does that ensure you’re Spirit-filled? Spirit-led? No. Does it change how your congregations engage with people on the margins, with people broke or unemployed or in recovery? Not really. Does it change how you minister the Gospel to broken people? By no means.

God does not issue or revoke blessing transactionally; God transforms through the Spirit – thanks be to God.