O Holy Night

[go4tli]

Man. Connections, you never cease to surprise and delight me. I mean
that.

I'm used to Christmas Eve services being these half-hearted affairs,
where it seems like no one is really "present" because they're
thinking about the following morning. Which is understandable,
really, but kind of a shame.

The service was short -- necessarily so -- but they nevertheless
managed to pack in so many things that I'm really grateful for.

The sermon included an idea that's really been stinging the back of my
brain lately -- the idea that the Kingdom of God is "both now and not
yet". It's an idea Christians have held for centuries, but I haven't
been emphasizing the "now" part as much as I think God would want me
to. It's my impression that American Christianity tends to focus on
the hereafter(1) -- which is wonderful, and certainly deserves our
attention, but we can't let it eclipse the fact that Christ's presence
needs to be made known here on Earth as well. After all, Emmanuel
means "God *is* with us" -- present tense -- not "we will be with God
one day".

Orlando led a wonderful praise session. Absolutely nothing was
distracted or half-hearted; no one shirked the hard work of
preparation, and I really think God was honored by the care that
seemed so clear to me.

And on that note, let me also thank you for including my favorite
verse of "O Holy Night". You don't get to hear it that often, because
people love to get to the chorus, and I can't blame them one little
bit:

Truly He taught us to love one another
His law is love and His gospel is peace
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His name all oppression shall cease

That's what I long for in the "not yet". It's also what I long for in
the "now". There's a reason "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" is sung in a
minor key (and thank you guys for including that, too, by the way!) --
it seems like the appropriate response to living in the world we live
in and being told that there is a Savior is *longing*. Not just the
hope in the hereafter, but the ache of desiring to be healed of
ancient wounds that would otherwise leave us only fatigue and despair.

Thank you, Jesus, for that healing we've seen so far. And help us to
remember all the healing we have left to do in Your name.

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(1) The focus on the hereafter is not wholly wrong. Christ told us
about it deliberatly -- so how can it be? He obviously seemed to want
to tell us about it so we would think about it sometimes.

But I think that we would be well-served to remember that this promise
does not absolve us of the need to represent God's love, justice,
mercy, etc., here on Earth, which Americans seem to rationalize away
in a peculiar fashion. Consider, for example, one of the first
recorded laws passed in what would some to be the United States: on
September 23, 1667, in Williamsburg, Virginia, slaves were barred from
obtaining their freedom by converting to Christianity. This was
accepted throughout the colonies (slavery wasn't just south of the
Mason-Dixon in 1667).

This seems specifically meant to address some tension in American
Christianity at the time -- the conflict between the institution of
slavery and things like Philemon and Galatians, which seemed to paint
the slave as our equal. The American solution was to shift the focus
of those teachings from this world to the next. Resolution of
injustice became pure eschatology -- it would all be settled up later,
so there was no need for us to work to exercise justice here and now
anymore, no need to consider the morality of our actions, no need to
listen to the nagging of the Holy Spirit. It was simply no longer
their concern.

This led, it seems to me, to a downward spiral of general apathy about
representing Christ in the present. Unfortunately, it didn't go away
with the Emancipation Proclamation. Whenever justice appears
difficult, or costly, or inconvenient, the response of a lot of our
appointed teachers is to shift our focus to the sweet by-and-by.