What does it mean to be a Christian?

Such a simple question and yet the answer very much seems to depend on who you ask. For some, all that matters is that you believe in Jesus and pray the “sinners prayer” to confess your sins. For others, it’s about how you work toward justice and mercy in the world. Still for others it appears to require agreement with a particular set partisan political positions. If you don’t vote X, for example, you must not be a Christian.

We are very quick as Christians to determine who is “in” and who is “out.” We are quick to say we love God and just as quick to assume the person who disagrees with us must not love God.

There’s only one problem. Jesus doesn’t allow us to simply “say” we love God. By connecting Leviticus 19:18 to the greatest commandment of loving God, he has declared that the only way we can actually love God is by also loving our neighbor… even the neighbors we most despise…

"Our baby is growing up so fast."

It's a common sentiment among new parents. All of the sudden she starts crawling or walking or he says his first word and we start to wonder where the time has gone. It's been said only half jokingly that we spend the first few years of a child's life teaching them to walk and talk and the next 16 or more years trying to get them to sit down and be quiet.

Luke records that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in the blink of an eye he is a twelve year old theological prodigy stumping the religious teachers with his amazing insights on the Holy Scriptures. And while we always like to paint Jesus in a perfect and innocent light, his response to mom that she should have known he would be in his "Father's House" could easily be taken as back talk and would certainly have gotten most kids in our century a pop on the mouth, or at the very least a long ride home with no tablet or cell phone.

Mary didn't understand, but she cherished every word in her heart…

"God and Jesus," we often say, as if they are separate. And often the Holy Spirit barely gets honorable mention.

Yet we worship GOD the Father, GOD the Son, and GOD the Holy Spirit... God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity.

Even with our theological framework of this great mystery, that God himself came to earth and put on flesh to dwell among us and show us how to live, we still tend to distance the human Christ from the Almighty Heavenly Being whom we call God.

God often feels so distant, so Holy, so other, so incomprehensible, and sometimes even unapproachable. We talk as if God's got bigger problems to deal with than our petty concerns, but often this is only an excuse to cover up the pain we feel from the prayers we think God didn't answer. After all, why should we expect the Creator of the Universe to be concerned about our jobs, our health, even our insignificant lives or the lives of our loved ones. Everybody struggles. Everybody dies. Why should God care?

Babies, on the other hand, are close. We wrap them in our arms. We care for them. We hold them close and take joy in their smiles, their bright innocent eyes, their laughter, their warmth. We feel responsible to protect them in their vulnerable state. We don't look away for a second. We keep them under constant supervision for years to make sure no harm comes to them. Babies are nothing like God.

And yet we are to believe that God became a baby? That an all powerful God made himself so weak and vulnerable?…

"Go Big or Go Home"

That's the motto of our culture. Everything has to be big. Everything is evaluated on size. The size of our homes. The size of our bank accounts. The size of our office (metaphorically speaking as a symbol of how high on the corporate ladder we have climbed). The size of our social networks.

In the church world it translates to the size of our congregations, our buildings, our offerings, our events, etc. Bigger is always better and the bottom line on our statistical reports often determines whether or not a church is perceived as healthy or dying.

And if all of these things are not getting bigger, it is often assumed that something is wrong with us.

But sometimes bigger is not better…

"Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright..."

While I have a hard time believing that baby Jesus didn't cry at all, or that giving birth among the livestock was a calm and peaceful experience, there is a very real sense in which God's grand entrance into our world was done in silence. Even the priest was unable to speak about the birth of his own son who would be the prophet proclaiming the coming of the Lord…

Imagine you’re reading the Bible for the first time. You decide to read it straight through like any other book. Genesis goes pretty well. It’s filled with great epic stories like Creation, the Flood, Abraham, Joseph and so on. Exodus starts out pretty well too. Baby Moses put in a basket and floated up the river to the palace of the very pharaoh who would have had him killed with all the other male Hebrew infants. Then he grows up among the Egyptians only to turn on them and set his people free from slavery. God parts the Red Sea and leads his people through the wilderness to the promised land. The story moving along just fine and then we get stuck. Our exciting pageturner almost instantly becomes a boring and sometimes incomprehensible file box of ancient legal documents. We might skim through to a couple of other highlights…. stories like David and Goliath or Daniel in the Lion’s Den, but for the most part we have a tendency to get lost in this ancient text.

Then some well-meaning Christian friend tells us we should start in the Gospels. “That’s the good part,” they say. “It’s the story of Jesus.”

Great, back to the story…. and so we turn to Matthew Chapter 1, the first page of the New Testament. If Moses’ story was exciting, surely this story about Jesus will be even better.

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham: Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah and his brothers…

17 verses and 14 generations later, we finally get to Jesus. That is, of course, assuming we make it that far without giving up. What kind of a story is this. No “Once upon a time,” or even “It was a dark and stormy night.” All we get is an ancestory.com report for a family we know nothing about…

For centuries Israel had been praying for a fulfillment of God’s promise, a king to sit on David’s throne for all eternity. For generations they had been a marginalized people under the oppressive rule of one empire after another, and they had gone through a number of “would-be messiahs” who promised to save them only to be killed in the end. Would God ever send a Savior?

Now the savior stands before the Roman authorities accused of treason. His own people declare that he is a threat to Ceasar. “We have no king,” they say, “but the emperor.”

How did we fall so far? We went from a people who would do anything to be set free from Roman rule to a people who would ultimately reject God’s own Son in favor of the Roman Emperor who the world calls the son of God.

We shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Perhaps we are more alike than we care to admit…

… In our culture we would say that David should be glad, or at least relieved, by Saul’s death. It was business, not personal. Or perhaps we might say it’s just politics, not personal. In any case, the path to the throne was now clear for David and more than that, he no longer had to fear for his life with Saul hunting him down around every turn. Saul died in battle and David was spared the guilt of having to kill his enemy himself. From a business or political perspective, all’s well that ends well.

But for David, all is not well. David understood that it’s never just about business or politics. It’s always personal. No matter how evil, hateful, and even murderous Saul had been, David knew that Saul was still God’s anointed. God loved Saul. God had chosen Saul. Saul’s sin, in David’s eyes, did not make him any less God’s anointed King…

On All Saints Day we remember and celebrate the lives of the Great Cloud of Witnesses who have passed through the veil of death to feast at Christ’s heavenly banquet. Despite this celebration, however, it is easy for us to be uncomfortable with our own mortality. We don’t like to think about death.

In some ways, David’s example prepares us for this final stage of our journey into God’s eternal kingdom. King Saul gave his armor to David to protect him in battle against Goliath, but the armor clearly didn’t fit. It was too big and far too heavy for this small, agile shepherd boy.

In the same way, the things we hold onto in this life to protect us at some point become too big and too heavy for us to bear. All our “stuff” becomes too hard to manage and most of what we have collected doesn’t seem nearly as valuable at the end of our lives. Dying is, in part, a process of shedding the “armor” that we have put on throughout our lives to protect us…