tell me that sweet, old story

by Zach Kincaid on the last of the 12 days of Christmas

Sometimes pastors shouldn't use their imagination to embellish Scripture. There are certainly some passages that need a little nudge. The spies hiding on Rahab's roof, little David and big, giant Goliath, even Peter's magic shadow might be candidates. I remember reading Sarah Hadas's great take on Abraham from the perspective of his wife Sarah. It asked you to consider how crazy Abraham acted from watching fire parade through halved animals to the sacrifice of Issac. The Midrash is a great source for imaginative thought on linking up ideas and commentating on the biblical account. For example, the Midrash suggests that we are linked by the milk of Sarah as much as we are the blood of her patriarchal husband.

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a christmas challenge

The Christmas season poses a heightened challenge to us: can we look beyond ourselves and into the divinity that has come down from heaven in the person of Jesus? Not that alone, but can we embrace the uncertainty that comes from total surrender?

Lewis:

The natural life in each of us is something self-centered, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.  And especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual world. ...It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centeredness and self will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid it. 

We are ready to fight tooth and nail to keep secret all the things we don't want Jesus to root out. But, he must. And...

 ...the business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into a timeless "spiritual" life has been done for us [through Jesus].

Lewis  goes on to say that we must get close to him and as we do "we shall catch it," catch the "infection" of salvation and grace. The challenge of Christmas is to get close enough to wonder in the incarnation and not mistaken it as trite.

(Both citations are taken from Mere Christianity, chapter 5.)

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christmas racket

by Zach Kincaid
It seems to me that the Christmas season is not a time of hope, peace, joy, or love - not in the expectant sense of advent promise. C.S. Lewis says that he sent no cards out and gave no presents (except to children) because of the "commercial racket" that is Christmas. In another letter Lewis qualifies the season as a nightmare. Yes, Father Christmas does show up in Narnia to provide needed gifts for the journey, and perhaps Lewis uses this encounter to reclaim some sense about the holiday.

It is the bastardization of "the season to be jolly" that discounts the lowliness of the manger and the truth that it should make us low also. Lewis points to this ridicule of the scene in "The Nativity:" "Among the oxen (like an ox I am slow)... Among the asses (stubborn I as they)... Among the sheep (I like sheep have strayed)."

Ridiculous in every way. And because the modern world can't sell hay they make hay about the production of a holiday wholly centered on humankind (at best) rather than on incarnation - the touching down of God on earth.

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don't be afraid

by Zach Kincaid

don't be afraid.
this must be amazing grace,
electricity in the air,
a galvanic presence from beyond,

brought down and tangled up
in chalcedon blessing;
son of God, son of man.

a passageway for angels to crowd the skies,
trumpeting a new song to terrified shepherds,
“don’t be afraid, we bring a word of great joy,”

an echo from creation's start
when GOD defines the good, and now,
on the eighth day,

"a savior born to you,"

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dark side of the moon, pink floyd

Reviewed by Rupert M. Loydell

Marbles, drinks coasters, scarves, glossy picture books, t-shirts, CDs of rehearsals, rough or alternate mixes & live tracks, DVDs that play as DVDs on your television or computer, and DVDs that play as audio in certain hi-fi systems, are just some of the constituents of Pink Floyd’s current re-releases and remastering programme, available in various packages from simply the original music on individual CDs, a heavyweight box set of every Pink Floyd album ever released, through to the Immersion box set of selected titles, for which you will need a mortgage, a lot of time, and several different music systems.

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round and round

by Zach Kincaid

Perhaps, church life is running in a kyklos.

The kyklos is how the Greeks viewed government -- in a cycle -- always turning in on itself as regimes are formed and dismantled, models made and then splintered. It goes round and round. Monarchy turns to despots turn to tyranny turns to oligarchy turns to democracy turns back to anarchy.

We see a similar turning in the church: papal rule becomes the oligarchy of the orthodox movement, and, nearly 500 years later deforms into the reformation (due to despot rule), and the idea of reformation turns into denominational structures. Under the ease of democracy, denominations break into congregational or free market religion, where the autotomy of the local church rules the day and any affiliation with a larger governance is more and more distant. This, ultimately (and we see it now) festers into an individual kind of religion, a "my Jesus" syndrome. So, faith in community turns into faith for and made by the individual person, an anarchy on what it means to be a community of saints.

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telling stories & giving voice

by Rupert M. Loydell
Here is the ‘Introduction’ to David Almond’s book Counting Stars:

These stories are about my childhood. They’re about the people I grew up with, our hopes and fears, our tragedies and joys. They explore a time that has disappeared and a place that has changed. They bring back those who have gone and allow them to walk and speak again within the pages of a book. Like all stories, they merge memory and dream, the real and the imagined, truth and lies. And, perhaps like all stories, they are an attempt to reassemble what is fragmented, to rediscover what has been lost.

Why has David Almond put this at the front of his book? One reason might be as a kind of legitimisation of what follows, a way of giving his stories a kind of authority: ‘these stories are about my childhood’ suggests they are true and real. Another reason is to give them a context, to offer the reader ‘a way in’ to them. We should also be aware this is a book marketed at children, so this is also a way of enticing a specific age group or readership to engage with big themes: ‘hopes and fears, tragedies and joy’, and with ‘a time that has disappeared and a place that has changed’, in other words a kind of history.

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a beam of light

by Ed Derby
If you read Lewis, the idea of imagination leading to faith is richly woven into nearly all his work. He certainly imagines Heaven in The Great Divorce and hellish battles in Screwtape Letters. The idea of holding at bay all you know in order to believe afresh could be, in some ways, the Twitter line for the entire Narnia series.

But I was struck again by the obvious. The Weight of Glory or Mere Christianity or any of Lewis's non-fiction gets to the conclusion of Jesus and a God-centric world through imagination. Sure, there is logic and doctrinal claims, but his main defense is to basically lead you into the story of faith.

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land of liberty

by Zach Kincaid
According to the Greeks liberty eats itself. That's Paul too - everything is permissible but not beneficial. There are definite ends to it, and, at the end of things, it's not pretty. It's usually not worth much at the start either, since liberty most often begins with war. For the Christian that war is within the soul, the wrestling match with God himself and his word. Then, he names you and grafts you into his family. It's a match that is ugly, insulting, and causes you to limp in humility and on toward grace... always toward grace.

For secular society the war that births liberty is more problematic. It inflects violence on the other in order to keep what is yours or what you've come to define as such. In the end, the rivers run with blood, the countryside is full of strange fruit, and the natives are not restless because they're usually dead.

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Tom-Foolery

by Zach Kincaid
"I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention Heaven and hell even in a pulpit," says Lewis (The Weight of Glory). He goes on to say that nearly all the references in the New Testament about both destinations come from Jesus himself, and, "If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tom-foolery. If we do, we must sometimes overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them."

The Christian calendar defines seven Sundays in the season of Easter before we reach Pentecost, or the act of transposition, as Lewis refers to it. Easter is the heightened period where the eternal meets the temporal in the resurrected Christ, and in this resurrected truth it seems an exaggerated time to reflect on heaven and hell and their more revealed reality post the crucifixion.

The question of afterlife garnered revived attention of late. Take the recent hub-bub about whether hell exists (See the cover of TIME a few weeks ago, for example and then read the book it references). Is it simply the woes of trying to market a book? Perhaps it's an outgrowth of a more settled way of church work with many pastors feeling more compelled to appeal for a "seat at the table" as one institution among many in the culture. Perhaps it's a reaction to a zealous way of offering Christianity wrapped in the bonds of choosing heaven or hell, eternal bliss or damnation. No matter, I'm sure that Lewis and Chesterton before him (and the many who pushed back against the pull toward modernity) would want us to make sure we're at the right table - the one God sets in the presence of our enemies (Ps. 23). Whether a marketing tease, a fight for acceptance that endorses a less orthodox approach to Gospel truths, or a segmentation away from less "enlightened," more directly focused evangelical folk, Lewis offers some good advice.

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