I occasionally have conversations with people who are not involved in the congregation I serve that reveal that people have very different understandings of the nature of the church than the institution I experience in my everyday life. Sometimes, upon finding that I am a minister, people begin to apologize for their lack of attendance at church. They may be apologizing for their failure to attend different congregations, as if they expect that I would be judgmental of those who don’t attend church. I never know quite how to respond to such statements. I’d be happy if that person were to find a church community that is meaningful and would become involved, but that is behavior that I can’t control. The person would need to make their own connections and commitment. I don’t make any judgments about a person’s character based on how often they attend worship. I am closer to those who are regular worshipers because I know them better. We spend more time together than I spend with folks who aren’t involved in churches. A person who doesn’t attend church doesn’t need to answer to me or to explain their behavior to me, but there seem to be quite a few people who feel compelled to do so.

Some people, upon learning that I am a minister, want to tell me part of their religious experience. That is understandable, such experiences are life-shaping and generally are interesting for me to hear. It seems to be a privilege of my calling that I know things about relative strangers that have not been shared with everyone else. I suspect that there are plenty of customers who shop in a certain office supply store who don’t know that one of the clerks is the daughter of a Lutheran minister. You could shop there for a long time without knowing that particular detail. One day, however, when I used the church’s credit card for a purchase, she asked me if I was a minister. When I answered, she told me about her father and continues to share bits and pieces of the story when I return to the store to make purchases. Perhaps she is just a friendly clerk who shares her stories with all of her customers, but it seems that we have a particular connection because of the similarity of her father’s vocation and mine.

Sometimes those who are not involved in churches, or at least not in the congregation I serve, speak as if they think that everyone in the church agrees about each detail of doctrine. Our church isn’t much for doctrine in the first place, preferring to use statements of faith as testaments of belief, not tests of faith. There is a wide diversity of beliefs within the congregation I serve and I think that the diversity is one of the treasures of the community. But outsiders think that we agree on every detail of our faith. I often will have a bit of a conversation with someone who thinks that being involved in a church means a specific belief. There are quite a few people who think that all people in the church are advocates for official teacher-led prayers in public schools and all reject scientific theories such as evolution. In my own personal case, I spent a decade serving in a community where the majority religion was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I’m simply not a Mormon and I pray differently than some of the public Mormon prayers that I have heard. I don’t want to live in a society where someone else decides what prayers should be prayed in school. I’m all in favor of prayer in all aspects of life, but I see no reason for the prayers to be imposed by school officials. And as to the theory of evolution, I don’t find my particular understanding of the Creation stories of our people to reject scientific method or commonly held discoveries of scientists. But on both of those issues, you would find a diversity of opinion in my congregation. We don’t see things from the same point of view.

People are not required to agree with me in order to participate in our congregation.

Faith, from my point of view, is different than intellectual assent. We don’t have to agree in order to believe together. In fact, we stand in a long tradition of engaging in conversation and even debate about interpretation of scriptures, tradition and other aspects of our faith. Jesus grew up in a tradition of teaching through arguing and debate. He often debated with the religious scholars of his day. Part of our Christmas tradition is the story of Jesus in the temple, talking with the elders at the age of 12, where the temple leaders. The Gospel of Luke reports, “they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions; and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.” (Luke 2:46-47) The temple as Jesus experienced it, was not a place where everyone agreed, but rather a place for questions and answers and the give an take of honest intellectual inquiry.

I enjoy thinking about God. I enjoy talking about God. I enjoy discovering new ideas and fresh perspectives. All of those things are aspects of my faith, but I also practice my faith by singing and repeating historic prayers and considering how our community has come to its unique position in the world. I don’t find it necessary to agree with every word of every hymn we sing in order to find comfort and solace in singing with a community in good times and hard times. I don’t sing to make logical arguments, but rather to participate in a community. This doesn’t mean that I have huge disagreements with the elements of worship we use, just that I see plenty of room for differences of interpretation in our words and actions.

The season of Christmas is a season of worship for me, and I am delighted that we bring many different perspectives to our worship. We’ll leave intellectual agreement and same beliefs to others.

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I remember nights when our children were very young. Perhaps my memory has merged several nights into a single memory, but I know that there were times when I was awake trying to calm a fussy baby, knowing that even though I was exhausted, my wife was equally so and trying not to wake her while I tried to come up with the right actions to calm the baby. Even though I was a dad who was actively involved in childcare, my repertoire of actions was fairly limited. If the baby was clean, dry and fed, about the only thing I knew to do was to wrap the child in a blanket and rock it. Sometimes I would sing. What I remember is being tired and feeling like I wished the child could talk and tell me what was the matter.

There weren’t many nights like that, really. Our children were healthy and grew quickly and from the perspective of these many years later, their time of being infants went by very quickly. Soon they were not only able to speak, but became articulate at telling us what they wanted and needed.

There are a lot of memories, of course, and I won’t report all of them in this blog, but here is another. Our children were 2 and 4. I was preaching as a candidate to be presented for call to a new parish. As the service was ending, I looked up to the rear of the sanctuary, where there was a window from the nursery. Parents could take their small children to that room where they could hear and see the service, while their children could play. When I looked up, our two children were standing with their faces pressed to the glass looking down at me. Suddenly, the weight of the decision that lay ahead overwhelmed me. If I accepted the call to this congregation, our children would be moving with us from one state to another. They would grow up remembering a city as their home town instead of a small town. My decision wasn’t just about me and my career, but about our whole family.

Being a parent is all about learning that one lives for more than oneself. The recognition that one’s decisions have a big impact on the lives of others is evident when one considers the children. Of course those who never become parents also live lives that have huge impacts on others. Children, however, remind one of this reality in an undeniable manner.

The journey from infancy to adulthood is especially long in humans. I watch the deer in the yard. As mammals go, they are fairly large. Their young, however, become quite capable in a short amount of time. They walk within a few minutes of their birth. They are nibbling grass and eating independently within a few months. By the age of two years, they are fully capable of living independently and engaging in full adult behavior. A few animals take a bit longer to grow to maturity. Humans take years. In earlier generations children were considered adults in their early teens when they reached sexual maturity. In our culture, we consider that trip to take much longer. Children often aren’t fully independent until their late twenties. Education, the establishment of careers, developing relationships, learning about intimacy, making commitments - there are a lot of complex parts to becoming an adult human being. Along the way children need love and support and, occasionally, a bail-out.

Becoming a parent is a long-term commitment. And that commitment continues when your children are in their thirties and forties and fifties as well. When they become parents, you feel the bond and connection in deeply meaningful ways.

One of the things that our children teach us is that our relationship with God is a growing and developing relationship. In this season each year we remind ourselves that God’s love for humans was expressed in the form of an infant. God didn’t enter humanity fully developed, but rather as an infant, born with need of assistance in nearly every aspect of survival. Jesus came to this world as a tiny babe, in need of help with eating, cleaning, and comforting.

The gospels don’t report much of his childhood. We have a few stories: the presentation of the infant in the temple, a return when he was 12 years old and the report that the an annual visit to the temple was part of his parents’ routine, and then, a verse or so later, Jesus is 30, considered to be a mature adult. The details have not been retained in our common memory, but we know from the record that his mother, Mary, “kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” Just because we don’t remember the details a couple of millennia later doesn’t mean that they weren’t important.

Given that the process of his growing took decades and required no small amount of patience on the part of his parents, we shouldn’t be surprised that sometimes it takes decades for contemporary humans to come to faith. Faith rarely is an instant process. It takes time and patience. It frequently involves missteps and diversions. And like the development of other aspects of adult life, we don’t all go through the process in the same fashion. Each journey of faith is unique with its own unique challenges and opportunities and experiences.

Christmas is a time of remembering that our faith is a relationship that grows and deepens over time. We need not expect instant results. We might experience a few nights that are long when the dawn isn’t clear. We are likely to become frustrated at times and marvel at others. And when, after many years of journeying, we look back, our minds will compress the journey and make it seem less difficult and long than it seemed as it was being lived.

This Christmas, give yourself the gift of patience. Allow time to pay attention and marvel at the wonder. Don’t look for instant results. Soon enough it will seem like it all passed far too quickly.

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I’ve heard lots of stories about the hidden meanings in the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Probably a few of them stretch the truth a little bit. Online, you will find bloggers and commentators who insist that the song is a Catholic catechism. The partridge in a pear tree is Jesus Christ, the four calling birds are the four gospels, the six geese are the six days of creation, the eleven pipers piping are the eleven faithful disciples, and so on. One story I read claimed that the reason that the catechism was hidden in symbolic language was that it dates to the period from the 16th through the 19th centuries when it was illegal to be Catholic in England. One of the problems with that story, however, is that there is nothing in the purported meanings of the song that is particularly Roman Catholic. Protestants believe in Jesus, the gospels, the creation and the disciples. And none of the stories that I have seen have given any original sources for their information.

It seems more likely that the song is just a fun counting song that entertains children and adults alike. I don’t know when the song was first published but it appears in “Mirth without Mischief,” published in 1780 and “The Nursery Rhymes of England,” published in 1842.

It is curious that the first verses all refer to birds, while verses eight through twelve are groups of entertainers. Well, minds a milking probably isn’t really entertainment like ladies dancing, lords leaping, pipers piping and drummers drumming. And then five golden rings brings to mind hand jewelry more than a bird. The five golden rings may, however, be a reference to the yellowish rings around a pheasant’s neck or to “goldspinks,” an old name for the goldfinch.

Counting birds at Christmas is a tradition that goes back quite a while. The official Christmas bird count began in 1900 which makes this year’s event the 116th count according to the Audubon Society’s web site. Christmas bird counts are conducted between December 14 and January 5. Local counts are arranged by volunteers and amateurs are welcomed to participate in identifying and counting wild birds. There is a specific methodology to the Christmas Bird Count and in each location a particular strategy is developed to count all of the birds within a 15-mile wide circle. Birds can be counted by direct sight or by sound, if the counter is able to identify the species.

The count is one of several citizens science projects that allow for large amounts of data to be collected by enabling interested volunteers to participate in genuine scientific research. The bird counts are used to monitor the health of various populations of birds, check on habitat degradation and other factors.

The tradition of counting birds at Christmas dates to an earlier tradition, that of hunting birds during the Christmas holiday. So called “side hunts” were competitions aimed at testing the marksmanship of shooters. Participants competed at how many birds they could kill, regardless of whether they had any use for the carcasses or whether the birds were beneficial, beautiful or rare. These senseless hunts led to the degradation and even total destruction of some species of birds. In 1900, ornithologist Frank Chapman, founder of Bird-Lord (which became Audubon magazine), proposed counting birds on Christmas instead of killing them.

At our home we used to feed birds year round. Then there came a year when there was a bird disease that was attributed to a fungus that was found in bird seed. As instructed, we cleaned out our feeders to make sure that we weren’t contributing to the problem. I noticed that the birds were creatures of habit and came to the feeders even when they were empty of seed. Later I learned that birds can form dependencies on feeders and that once started the practice needs to be sustained as it becomes part of the feeding cycle of the birds. I still feed the birds a little bit, but no longer keep multiple feeders going year round. Putting out bird seed during the Christmas season seems to be a kind gesture, especially when the weather is cold. I put out seed yesterday for the birds and will keep feeding until the weather warms.

I also have my annual “natural bird feeders” in the form of a crop of sunflowers. I plant sunflowers each year and leave them for the birds. The pinion jays seem to really like the seeds and often descend in mass and clean out the entire crop in a few hours.

Watching the birds in the wild, however, remains the best treat. Instead of attracting birds with food that I put out, I prefer to learn where the birds naturally congregate and where I am likely to see them when walking in the woods.

Around here winter is a time with fewer species of birds. Many of our birds head south for the winter and enjoy warmer temperatures and more abundant food nearer the equator during this time of the year. That gives us the joy of watching for their return in the spring. The first tanager of the year is always a delight and a treat.

I’ve never taken the time to become an educated bird watcher. I don’t know the names of many of the birds that we see around here and I haven’t taken the time to learn all of the calls. I can identify a few species and I enjoy looking at the wide variety of birds, but I’d be little help on an official bird count because I would be spending all of my time looking up the birds and then being uncertain about what I had seen and heard. I have a friend who is an amateur ornithologist and has developed a great deal of expertise in identifying birds. He and his wife have made birdwatching one of their major hobbies for decades. I haven’t been similarly dedicated.

So I’ll just speculate about the possible meanings of five golden rings in an attempt to understand a children’s song. After all, singing songs with children is as much fun as watching birds.

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Growing up, the fourth day of Christmas was my father’s birthday. We loved to hang on to the Christmas spirit for several days around our house. Winter was a slower time for father’s business and he often worked shorter days between Christmas and his birthday. The final days of the year were devoted to inventory and end of the year business, and there were always a few significant sales in his business as ranchers took a look at their tax situation and considered the implications of making a major purchase at the end of the year instead of deferring it into the next year. For the most part, however, the first four days of Christmas were devoted to family time.

We played outdoors a lot when we were kids. If the wind had been blowing, there’d be big snow drifts at the airport and we could carve snow caves and play inside of the drifts. There was always sledding and tobogganing down the hills and, depending on the snow conditions, you could ice skate on the irrigation ditches and go for miles. If the snow was moist enough we made snowmen and other creatures out of the snow, built snow forts and held snowball fights.

Dad’s birthday was always a bit of a logistical problem for us kids. We had just spent our chore money on Christmas presents, so we weren’t exactly feeling wealthy. And it was always a challenge to know what to purchase for Dad. He loved orange slice candy, but with seven children, not everyone could get him the same gift, even though candy was always a good idea because the first thing he did upon opening candy was to pass it around and everyone got a piece.

What I remember is that we did a lot of things together. Looking back, I realize that some of our family activities revolved around dad’s work. We often “played’ at the shop or the airport - the places of his work - during our vacation from School. But there was a different mood to the days around Christmas. It is worth noting that our family always waited until Christmas day for our celebrations. My younger brother’s birthday was Christmas Eve and we made a distinct separation between the two events. I knew the song, “The twelve days of Christmas,” but didn’t really know the reason for a twelve-day celebration. Usually we were back in school before twelve days had passed and there was always New Years Day - a feast only a week separated from Christmas Day. Still I had a sense that Christmas was more than just a single day. I also knew that our father’s birthday was a day to celebrate and a day for family fun and activities.

Now, from the perspective of an age my father never reached, I look back with gratitude for that childhood. I was indeed a very fortunate person to have been raised with so much love in a family with such remarkable parents. One of the things both of my parents taught me was the power of incarnation - of word made flesh. Although the Gospel of John can be read as if the process is a bit ethereal and theoretical, there is a very practical side to those who can make a direct connection between the words they speak and the actions they take in their lives. Our father was one of those people who lived the concepts and ideas that were most important to him. He didn’t just talk about love - he lived it. He didn’t just talk about peace - he lived it. He didn’t just talk about truth and justice. He lived them.

I don’t know that I was aware of how rare it is or how risky it can be to show such integrity. We live in a world where there are plenty of empty words. And we live in a world where it often appears that power and prestige arise from angry and even hateful words. It doesn’t take much time of watching television to come to the conclusion that so called political leaders run orchestrated campaigns of disconnect between words and actions. They say one thing and do another. They make promises that can’t possibly be kept.

We long for the important words - love, truth, peace and justice - to become flesh and dwell among us. We long for incarnation. It is a process filled with risk.

That is what is so remarkable about our story. God chooses to become human flesh in a very risky fashion. God comes not as a warrior king, or a wealthy benefactor, but rather as a child of poverty. And Christmas comes each year as an invitation to each of us to be born again - to take on the shape of one who lives for what is truly important despite the risks involved.

It is one of the treasures of living Christmas as a season instead of a day. We are given time to get beyond the crass commercialization of the day. The stores have already moved on. We can go beyond what too often becomes showtime filled with bling in our churches to the real thing. We can but aside our disagreements over whose theology is best and look again to the true meaning of the story.

An infant in a manger is as vulnerable as human beings get. If we would allow that story to live in our lives, we are invited to show our vulnerability as well. The needs of the baby are simple: food, shelter and protection from harm. A child needs to be swaddled in unconditional love.

There is no shortage of the need for food, shelter and protection from harm. From the refugees fleeing conflict and war to the neighbors who lack sufficient resources we are surrounded by vulnerable humans. And we are invited to join them in their vulnerability.

As we journey through this season this year, I keep thinking of the Word become flesh. What good words within me are waiting to take on flesh? How can I love others in ways that allow those words to be born and dwell embodied in the world?

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A couple of months ago we had an interesting conversation in a meeting of our Department of Worship. We were discussing our Christmas worship services, specifically the services we hold on Christmas Eve. Some of the members of the department were concerned about hospitality and making our guests feel welcome. The feeling was that passing the plate makes it seem as if we are asking our guests to pay for the expenses of operating our church. After a good conversation the decision was to use a donation box in the entryway of the church instead of passing the plates during the service. Interestingly, the box ended up being placed right at the front door as people came into the building and couldn’t be missed by visitor or regular.

The offerings at that particular service don’t go to the operating costs of our congregation. They go to mission projects. This year the offerings were designated for Church Response and for the mission meals served by our Department of Ministries at Cornerstone Rescue Mission and at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

While the conversation was a helpful discussion, it focused on a contemporary sense of hospitality without venturing into the history of offerings and their role in worship. The practice of bringing offerings as an act of worship is ancient, far more ancient than the observance of Christmas. Making offerings to God appears in the earliest stories of the Bible and the tradition of bringing offerings as an act of worship was well established practice before the birth of Jesus.

Of course there is a practical side to offerings. The church is an institution with expenses and we do use some of the money given as offerings to operate that institution. We pay the light bills, salaries, maintenance, and program costs out of the offerings that are made by our members and guests. This tradition of institutional maintenance was part of the offerings at the Temple in Jerusalem back in the days when agricultural products were being offered. Part of the offerings made at the temple were used by the priests for food and to offset the costs of operating the temple. There are, however, meanings attached to offerings that reach beyond the maintenance of the institution.

The first chapters of the Book of Leviticus outline 5 different kinds of offerings that are appropriate for the worship of God. The burnt offering was a sacrifice that was completely burnt. None of it was to be eaten at all, and therefore the fire consumed the whole sacrifice. It was the tradition that the fire on the altar was to be continually burning and never put out, similar to the perpetual flames that are common as memorials in contemporary churches. Meal offerings were often cooked bread or dough. A portion was placed on the fire and consumed, but the bulk of the loaf was used as food for the priests, except in the cases when the original gift had been made by a priest. A peace offering was shared by the fire on the altar, the priests, and often with common people within the temple. Peace offerings were generally animals which were slaughtered and cooked within the temple. Unleavened cakes were also offered as peace offerings. Sin offerings were given in response to sins that were identified and recognized in the community. The offering was a method of reconciling with God and other people. The size and type of offering was different depending on the perceived size of the sin that had been committed. The trespass offering was similar to the sin offering, but usually was an offering of currency in response to a sin that involved fraud, stealing or mismanagement of money. The book of Leviticus takes seven full chapters to address the subject of offerings and this simple summary doesn’t do justice to the nuances of the various offerings.

In our contemporary worship, the process of offering is simplified. Giving is a way of expressing gratitude. In the act of offering we acknowledge our gratitude to God for the gift of life. Even in the midst of difficulties or illnesses there is much for which to be grateful and making an offering is a way of expressing that gratitude. It is common for people’s attention to be drawn to money when we make our offerings because we pass a plate to receive gifts of money, but the intention - and the words used in our worship - always focuses on gifts of time and talent as well as financial gifts. The prayer of dedication often mentions that monetary gifts are symbolic of the wider gifts of lives that are offered in this portion of our worship service.

The conversation that we began at that meeting is worthy of continuation. There are many ways to make offerings in the context of worship. In addition to using an offering box and passing the plates, there are congregations where offerings are brought to the communion table by worshipers and placed there as a sign of dedication. Many of our members make their most substantive offerings through monthly or annual checks or electronic transfers of funds. The passing of the plate is largely symbolic for them. Others like to actually place their gifts in the plate and listen carefully as the prayer of dedication is given. There is room in the church for many different kinds of offerings. We don’t follow the practices of the law as outlined in Leviticus. There is no continual flame on our table that consumes the offerings of our members.

We do, however, understand that the primary reason for having offerings as a part of our worships the need of our members to give, not the need of the institution to receive.

In popular culture the gifts of the Magi are often associated with Christmas though in the church we wait until January 6 to celebrate their visit and see Epiphany as a separate season from Christmas. Giving gifts, however, is associated with all of the twelve days of Christmas and is an appropriate focus of our attention during this season.

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I have little energy for arguments over the existence of God. I’m sure that they engender the passion of others, but they seem to me to be quite silly. When I have paid attention to such arguments, I have discovered that the “god” in which people do not believe bears little resemblance to the God I experience in my life. Those who argue that there is no god, seem to be obsessed with God as a supernatural being to which none of the observable laws of nature apply.

Our story, however, is all about incarnation - God coming to us in the midst of the world, in the ways of the world, in the realities of everyday human existence. We have no problems with believing in miracles, but it doesn’t take miracles for us to see God in the ordinary and every day.

The four Gospels are quite different in their narratives of Christmas. Mark doesn’t bother with a birth narrative of Jesus at all. In a headlong rush to tell the story of the crucifixion and the revelation of Jesus nature in the events of his human death, Mark doesn’t take time to tell the stories of Jesus’ birth, but rather begins with a very brief description of John the baptizer and the story of Jesus’ baptism. Matthew focuses on Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph and his rather limited role. He traces Joseph’s genealogy, speaks of Joseph’s hesitation about Mary’s pregnancy, and devotes half a sentence to the birth itself before telling about the visit of wise men from the East. Luke invests chapters in the description of Mary, her relatives, their songs and the build up to the birth of Jesus, which is told in a single paragraph. Then Luke goes on to discuss the visit of Shepherds. Luke is especially enamored with the visit of angels and how such visitations inform the various witnesses to the birth of what is going on. John does not rely on narration, but rather turns to philosophy, theology and poetry to speak of the symbolic meanings of Jesus birth.

I have not been gifted with facility in languages. I struggle with the language of my birth and childhood and have so far only learned a few words of other languages. I can barely decode Greek with the help of a lexicon and have relied on the translations of others to read and study the New Testament of our Bible. But even in translation, the prologue to the Gospel of John is a masterpiece of human poetry and symbolic language. I recite the first chapter of the Gospel each year at our Christmas Eve services, though I have noticed my memorization isn’t quite perfect in recent years. Still, the words of that part of the Bible are deeply ingrained in my thinking and my living.

So there is nothing “objective” about my approach to conversations about God and religion.

Like the Gospel, it seems to me that there is no need to prove or argue the existence of God. It seems as silly as arguing the existence of the air we breathe or the water we drink. God simply is. And God has always been. John’s way of putting this is: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word with with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”

Laying aside the issue of gender, which is made more complex by the translation and the lack of a pronoun in English that doesn’t either assign gender or render the antecedent as an inanimate object, the Gospel writer simply beings with the reality of God. There is no argument for the existence of God, but rather a simple assumption that God is. In that way of thinking I completely align with the Gospel. And I go a step farther with the Gospel. God is in everything. There is nothing that can be observed in this universe that isn’t infused with God.

Those who think that God must be somehow supernatural - outside of the realities of the universe - might say that one can’t directly observe God. I answer that you can’t help observing God. There is nothing you can observe that doesn’t reveal a part of God.

Christmas is our season of reminding us of this reality. We don’t need to go elsewhere to seek God. We don’t need a special pilgrimage, or a specific destination. We don’t need institutions or churches or priests or guides. Experiencing the holy is as simple as inhaling and exhaling. It is as natural as holding a baby.

On this second day of Christmas, I awoke to fresh snow on the ground. The beauty of simply looking out the window is overwhelming. But I am aware that not every person has the same perspective. Over a hundred homes were destroyed in Christmas fires in Victoria, Australia. The war in Iraq continues to threaten the lives of innocents. Northern Afghanistan has been hit by a major earthquake. There are more than 150,000 people left homeless in the wake of South American floods. Many are missing in a huge landslide in Myanmar. At least fourteen have been killed in massive storms that have roared through the Midwest and South of our country.

There is no shortage of places where one has to look carefully to observe God’s presence. It isn’t that God is not present, it is that we fail to recognize that presence. The Gospel of John is well aware of that reality: “He was in he world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not.”

For me the celebration of Christmas involves all four of the gospels - each unique perspective. I pay attention to the words of the prophets and to the stories of angel visits. I appreciate the genealogy and history of the holy family. I treasure the ancient tales of the baby born in a crowded place when his parents were on a trip. And I am moved by the philosophical tone of John’s poetry.

The story is simply too big for a single telling or a single day. Fortunately we are given a season each year to contemplate its glory.

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I am blessed to be a person who is very content with the live that has been given to me. I grew up in a loving and supportive family, I was lucky to meet the love of my life when I was young and together we have grown a marriage and a family. Our children are incredibly wonderful people. Our grandchildren amaze us. We’ve had health and meaningful work. There is much for which to be grateful.

Sometimes, however, I do think “what if” kind of questions. “What if my parents had settled in a different location?” “What if I had chosen a different school?” “What if I had taken a different career path?” They are silly questions, I know, but I sometimes persist in thinking about them.

I think that I could have been very happy with a life that had a bit less public exposure. I seem to enjoy very much the opportunities I have to worship with smaller groups of people. I like quiet and calm. I enjoy the peaceful feeling of a nearly empty church.

Last night we had two wonderful opportunities to worship. Like many other program churches, our 7 pm service was busy, a bit hectic, and full of tradition and meaning. It also was a production that required costumes, rehearsals, scripts, lighting, and lots and lots of behind-the-scenes work. The hour before the service was filled with questions and people running around and excitement. The baby’s parents were a bit nervous about the whole affair. Kings forgot where they’d placed their gifts. Someone wanted to know who was running the star. The choir needed just a few more minutes of rehearsal. A musician was a bit unsure of where her part was in the service. The ushers wanted to know about lights and what to do with the candles. I was trying to remember lines that had to be delivered in the dark and was worrying about whether or not all of the people would end up in the right place at the right time.

It was all normal. It was all church. I don’t want to trade all of that for anything. But it was a bit wild for a few minutes.

I felt like going in my office, shutting the door and hiding for a few minutes. I thought better of that feeling and stuck with my role as pastor and worship leader.

The service was wonderful and afterwards many people told me how much they appreciated it.It was what is expected of a church like ours in a community like ours. I’m glad we did not disappoint.

The we went home and took a break and before long it was time to head back to the church for our 11:30 service. The time of the service is intentional, to make the service accessible for shift workers who work until 11 pm. It is a wonderful time for a service.

The attendance surprised me. I knew that the service is growing in popularity, but we didn't expect quite so many. Still it was only about a quarter of the attendance at the 7 pm service. The room is quiet. The music is gentle. There is time to listen and think and pray. We shared a few carols. I recited the birth narrative from Luke’s Gospel. We shared communion. We tolled the bell twelve times at midnight.(OK the attendance meant it took longer to serve communion and we tolled the bell at 12:15.)

A few minutes later, I turned off the lights, locked up the church, and headed home. The air was clear and cold. As we drove out of town, we began to see the stars that are obscured by the lights of the city.

Christmas is not about pageantry and preparation and programs and printed bulletins. Christmas is not about repeating the rituals accurately enough to avoid complaints, while making sure that there is enough change to satisfy the next generation. Christmas isn’t about statistics or numbers or fiscal sustainability or best business practices. Christmas doesn’t require an institution to be real.

As I relaxed at the end of the evening, I recalled a conversation, via voice message with my grandson. “I’m calling to ask you what time was the baby Jesus born. I think that you should know this and that is why I am calling you to find out when the baby was born. I would like to know his birth time.”

I replied that I don’t know for sure, because it was so long ago and his parents didn’t have watches and no one can remember. I think, however, that it might have been at night because the shepherds saw his star.

He replied confidently, “I’ve seen baby Jesus’ star . . . But in the afternoon.”

I couldn’t argue with his logic. It seems quite possible both that Jesus could have been born in the afternoon and that a four-year-old could recognize his star, no matter what time of day it appeared.

When I became a pastor, I never realized that I would be granted such precious conversations. To have a grandson who is filled with wonder at the story and is articulate enough to ask his questions has to be one of life’s great joys for an old pastor.

What time did Christmas come?

Perhaps it was during the pageantry of the big service with the choir and organ and cello and flute and hundreds singing carols.

Perhaps it was at the late service as the bell tolled to greet the new morn.

Perhaps it was as I stepped out of the car on the starlit night and inhaled the cool air of a winter’s evening.

It is just as likely, however, that Christmas came for me around 3 in the afternoon when our grandson asked me a question through the technology of voice messages on my cell phone.

Years from now, when I tell the story, I won’t get the time right. And it shouldn’t surprise us that we don’t know the exact time of Jesus’ birth. Because the truth is that even millennia later, we continue to experience his coming in new and fresh ways every year.

Blessed Christmas to all!

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I woke in the wee hours last night. It isn’t at all uncommon for me. I’ve never been very good at sleeping and I frequently rise in the night and read a few magazine articles or a chapter of a book before settling into a second round of sleep before getting up in the morning. I’ve read that this is a particularly bad habit. Studies show a connection between poor sleep patterns and weight gain, heart disease, and a number of other problems and ailments. However, my sleeplessness, or rather waking in the night, seldom causes me any distress of which I am aware. I simply take a break from my sleeping and before long I’m back in bed.

What was fun about last night was that I woke with a Christmas carol in my head. I suppose that if I lived alone, I might have literally sung out in the night, but respect for my made led me to think better of that. It was not surprise to me that the carol that was occupying my mind at 1:34 a.m. was the traditional English carol, sometimes known as Sussex Carol:

On Christmas night all Christians sing,
To hear the news the angels bring;
On Christmas night all Christians sing,
To hear the news the angels bring:
News of great joy, news of great mirth,
News of our merciful King’s birth.

The carol was arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1919. The main reason it was in my head is that our choir spent over an hour woodshedding a particularly challenging arrangement of the carol last night. We will be singing it at the 7 pm service this evening. The arrangement calls for the melody to be traded between female and male voices, with particularly challenging intervals in the harmony. To make matters even more complex, the six-eight time can be divided into two beats per measure or three beats per measure and sometimes we have to sing three beats against two (or vice versa). And it is a song of joy so the tune really moves along. After all:

Then why should men on earth be sad,
Since our Redeemer made us glad:
Then why should we on earth be sad,
Since our Redeemer made us glad:
When from our sin He set us free,
All for to gain our liberty.

Our choir is a bit small this Christmas. It is a product of the times in many ways. Our congregation is constantly changing. Families come and go as careers and life events lead them in different directions. We lose several members to death each year. New members come, but it takes time for them to learn the art of church craft and become as fully involved as were the members who we have lost. This isn’t a bad thing. We’ve had a bubbly and exciting year with more baptisms than any year in the last 25. I can remember years when we were wondering if we had a baby to play the part of Jesus in the pageant. This year, we had at least seven readily available. Our tradition of having the newest baby for the Christmas Eve service means that we’ll have a baby that is in its first month tonight. We’re happy about the growth and change in our church. But while the population is swelling in the baby department, we’re going through a slump in the choir.

Choral singing is experiencing a decline in our culture at the same time. Many congregations, even those larger than ours, are replacing traditional choirs with small ensembles to lead music. There is no single right way to worship, but the decline of choirs is a sad thing for me. I enjoy participating in a church where there are lots and lots of leaders and where it takes teamwork and practice to produce worship. Choral singing teaches about being a member in a group and seems so appropriate to worship. When there are too many small ensembles or soloists, it can come off as a performance for the applause of an audience. A choir leading a congregation in song makes it much more participatory for all. I know that is a bias, but at least it is a bias with a bit of theological basis.

But we belong to our culture. We reflect the wider culture of our community. How could it be otherwise. Even though we are called to be counter-cultural - to live in response to the goodness of God rather than the pressures of the world - we are influenced by the culture in which we are immersed.

When sin departs before Your grace,
Then life and health come in its place;
When sin departs before Your grace,
Then life and health come in its place;
Angels and men with joy may sing,
All for to see the newborn King.

The practice of Christian faith in this life is never a clear-cut slice of perfection. It is a human attempt to respond to the goodness of God from the midst of this life. We bring our best before God knowing that it will be accepted because of God’s grace and love. We make mistakes because we are human. We present our human lives to God knowing that God understands our humanity, has lived our human condition, and loves us.

So tonight we will raise our carols. We will tell our story. We will light our candles. We will celebrate from the midst of our confused and confusing lives. We will not deny the pain and sorrow and sadness of this world. We will not forget those who are suffering. We will not pretend that we’ve got everything figured out. Instead we will acknowledge that God comes to us in the midst of our human condition, filled with grief and sorrow, sin and sadness. And in that messy reality that is human existence, God brings hope, peace, joy and love.

All out of darkness we have light
Which made the angels sing this night;
All out of darkness we have light
Which made the angels sing this night:
“Glory to God and peace to men,
Now and forevermore. Amen.”

Tonight will be a night to celebrate.

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I’ve written before about how a few sentences at the beginning of the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke form the basic birth narrative of Jesus and how tradition has enhanced those sentences with a lot of extraneous material that didn’t come from the Bible, but rather from traditions that grew up around the biblical story. It is fair, however, to assume that Bethlehem was crowded. However you interpret the word “inn,” we read that the birth didn’t take place there because there was no room and that the baby was laid in a manger after he was born.

It isn’t very crowded in Bethlehem this year. The manager of the Jacir Palace Hotel, Johnny Kattan, reports that the hotel is booked at about 50%. They are used to being over booked, around 110%, during the Christmas season. The number of tourists visiting Bethlehem in October and November were half the number of previous years.

The hotel stands about 100 yards from an Israeli military checkpoint that is the target of violent demonstrations. It isn’t uncommon for guests to step outside of the hotel to the smell of tear gas and burning tires. The aroma of “skunk water,” sprayed by Israeli soldiers to disperse rock-throwing crowds, often penetrates to the lobby of the hotel.

There has been a surge of violence since October. Eighteen Israelis have been killed by Palestinians using knives, automobiles and guns. 125 Palestinians have been shot dead. Four of the dead came from Bethlehem, including a 13-year-old boy, Abdel Rahman Obeidallah, who was killed by a bullet to the chest. Israeli officials have suggested that his killing was a mistake. Two of the bodies of the Bethlehem dead have not been returned. Israel says they will be celebrated as martyrs and refuses to release the bodies.

And it isn’t just the Israeli-Palestinian violence that is keeping the tourists away from Bethlehem. The Paris attacks, the tensions between Russia and Turkey, the crash of the Metrojet flight in the Sinai after a bomb went off killing all 224 passengers and crew — all of these violent events have reduced the desire of tourists to visit Bethlehem.

Most years they set off fireworks in Manger Square to celebrate the season. This year, there were no fireworks. The sounds are too similar to violent attacks. Instead the churches rang their bells. The pilgrimage from the Old City of Jerusalem to Bethlehem will proceed, but is expected to draw smaller crowds. There will be the traditional Christmas Eve Mass at the Church of the Nativity, built above the grotto where tradition says Jesus was born and visited by the shepherds.

The city of peace has no peace this year.

Israel continues to confiscate more and more land to complete the separation wall at Bethlehem’s perimeter. Construction has been approved for 891 additional units in Gilo, a Jewish settlement that abuts Bethlehem.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas in previous years, pilgrims waited in line for up to three hours for a moment of prayer at the Church of the Nativity. This week the tour guides simply lead their charges right up to the place of prayer. They urge them to take their time. There is no rush.

The pilgrims who do come pray for peace.

It is a place of miracles, but it seems that patience is required. Peace doesn’t seem near with all of the protests and the violent response to those protests.

I’ve never visited the Holy Land, though I’ve often dreamed of such a trip. It isn’t the threat of violence that deters me, however. I suspect that an American tourist is safer on a visit to Bethlehem than walking the streets of Chicago. The risks of travel are not bigger than the risks of staying home. I do not want, however, for a trip to the places of the Bible to be simply a tourist adventure - a display of wealth in a land of poverty. I would prefer, rather, an opportunity to get to know some of the people who live there, to sense who they are and how their lives proceed. Most of the options to travel to the Holy Land, however, don’t involve conversation with the people who live there. The way to travel in the region economically is to be a part of a group of similar tourists who eat, lodge and travel by the busload, visiting site after site on and organized itinerary. Such a trip doesn’t appeal to me and I don’t know how to plan the kind of trip I envision. So, for now, I have not yet figured out how to visit.

At this time of the year, however, my thoughts turn towards Bethlehem. I think of the couple who traveled there from their home so long ago. I think of the baby born in ordinary circumstances. I think of the shepherds who, amazed and dazzled by the visit of angels, made their way to see the child. I think of the mother who listened to the shepherds stories and kept them in her heart to ponder.

I live far from that place and I’ve never visited, but its story has become part of my story. I feel that my life is connected to the lives of those who live there, though a genealogist likely wouldn’t discover any common relatives.I dream of an end to the rock throwing and tear gas and snipers aiming their weapons at children. I dream of a day when a huge wall isn’t needed to separate those who have lived in the area for generations from the settlers. But I also read the news from that land. I know the stories of people whom I have never met well enough to know that Bethlehem, as was the case in the days of Roman occupation, is a difficult and dangerous place to live. Its story is still being played out in the lives of the present generation.

So we wait in Advent expectation every year. For God still has more Christmas blessing to bring to the people and the land.

Christmas is almost here, but not quite. We wait in that “not quite” and pray without pressure for as long as it takes.

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Solstice, from the Latin words “sun” and “stop,” refers to the sun appearing to stop moving south in the sky and begin moving north. The ancient Romans didn’t realize that it is motion of the earth relative to the sun that causes the phenomena. They believed that it was the sun that was in motion around the earth. What causes the solstice is that the axis of the earth is tilted, so in the winter the northern half of the earth is farther from the sun and in the summer, the northern half of the earth is nearer to the sun. The winter solstice for those of us who live in the northern hemisphere is the summer solstice for those who live in the southern hemisphere. The solstice is a scientific phenomenon that is observed as a time of celebration in many places around the world. Bonfires and parties are common elements in solstice observances and celebrations.

It is true that the days will start getting longer for those of us who live up north, though it takes a few days before the change is significant for us to recognize it. Longer days, however, don’t mean instantly warmer temperatures because the oceans continue to cool well into the new year. Our coldest temperatures can occur towards the end of January or even into February.

The solstice occurs at the same moment everywhere on the earth. I can occur as early as December 20 or as late as December 23 because of variations in the movement of the earth, but the precise moment of the winter solstice was 9:48 p.m. in our time zone last night. That means the solstice was 10:48 pm in the Eastern Time Zone of the US and that it occurred on December 21st in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Police pay attention to phenomena like the solstice because there are changes in people’s behavior. As the solstice approached last night the police in our town were busy. I was out providing support to a brand-new widow who had just lost her husband to suicide. In shock and horror, she needed support to make the simplest of decisions and to form a plan for the next few hours of her life. She had relatives to notify. She needed to arrange a place for to stay for the night. (After the investigation, clean up of her home lasted well past midnight. It was not the right place for her to spend the night even though her sleep was certainly already disrupted.)

Other officers were simultaneously responding to an armed robbery on the east side of town.

The solstice isn’t the only time crime occurs. The casino that was robbed has been robbed three times since August. Police have responded to a total of ten casino robberies in the past four months. The suicide was the 26th in our community this year. You can do the math. That averages one every two weeks. Only they aren’t evenly distributed, so if you follow the trend of the last few weeks, it is completely possible that we will see more before the end of the year. Last night’s event was less than four days from the previously most recent death by suicide in our town.

Of course robbery is not the same as suicide. And neither is caused by the rotation of the earth, the tilt of its axis or the hours of daylight. It is simply that all were occurring at about the same time last night. It is true, however, that the solstice will bring back stark and painful memories to the surviving widow of last night’s suicide and to the clerk who was the victim of the robbery. You don’t forget those kinds of events easily. They change your life.

In a sense both the robbery and the suicide were acts of desperation. It is easy for those of us who look upon such behavior from the outside to see that those involved had many other options and might have made different decisions. But our perspective is different and those involved didn’t recognize the other options when making their choices.

And life doesn’t have a rewind button.

And those left behind will continue to ask the question, “why?” without ever receiving an answer. We don’t know why. We can’t know why. The answer, in the case of death by suicide, dies with the victim.

So I focus my attention on a different question: “What?” For the people I am helping travel through a traumatic time of grief and loss, we decide what will happen next. We make a plan about how to get care for those who are suffering. We explain what is happening with the investigation. We facilitate contacts with the cleaning service. We explain a little of how insurance pays for home repairs. We focus our attention on “what” is going to happen, not “why” thing have happened. And we know that the victims can’t get the “why” question out of their minds.

For people in our traditions of faith, this is a time of the year when we focus our attention on the enduring realities of hope, peace, joy and love. These are not things that deny the presence of loss or pain or ugliness in the world. They do not pretend that desperation does not exist. They reach deeper into the realities of human existence to declare that hope does not die despite the horrors that people have witnessed. Peace is possible despite the violence that is so prevalent. Joy abides in the darkest places of pain and grief. Love is born into a world of hate.

Even though it sometimes doesn’t seem that way, death is not the victor. God’s gift of life triumphs in spite of all of the pain and terror and torture and ugliness of this world.

The ancients believed that the sun was going away as the days became shorter and the nights became longer. They celebrated because they thought that they had to do just the right things to cause the sun to return. We know that the universe works in a different manner. But in the workings of the universe are revealed a deep truth: the light will return. Warmth will come back. This is not the end.

How often we need to be reminded of that truth.

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Yesterday after worship, I was holding the baby who played the part of Jesus in the morning’s Christmas pageant while his mother took his brother through the line to get cookies after worship. The seven-month-old child was very comfortable with being a part of the after church crowd in the fellowship hall and not threatened by his mother walking away for a few minutes. He had been a great actor in his first role. He loved the music and when the other children sang, his feet and hands danced in rhythm. As I held him I was struck by how at home he is in his world. He is not an anxious or confused child at this age. He has known love and care and nurture and is a trusting soul when he is in his church.

That’s one of the remarkable things about the incarnation. It is utterly common and ordinary. A baby is born. A baby is loved. A baby grows through childhood into adulthood and shares love with others.

The people of Israel had waited for a long time for their messiah. In the waiting and anticipation, they had come up with a lot of different visions about what it might mean and how it might happen. Many expected a political savior, in the model of King David, who would rise up and make their country into the dominant world power instead of a conquered country living at the edge of an expansive empire that didn’t seem to care about them very much, except to extract taxes and train inexperienced military. Others expected a cataclysmic world event, in which history as we know it would come to an end and God’s reign over the world would change everything.

Most expected that the coming of the messiah would mean that their particular religious views would be accepted by the majority and those who disagreed would be punished by God.

Then it happened. In fact we don’t know for sure the exact date or the specific location because so many people didn’t notice it at first. The reality was that poor young women gave birth to babies in the common rooms of homes every day. You cleaned up the mess, washed up the baby, wrapped it in clean clothes and went on with life. It was completely ordinary. Other women in the family taught the new mother how to care for her baby and life went on.

But you know that no birth is “ordinary.” Every birth is its own miracle. When they hand that baby to you and you hold its fragile little body in your arms and your realize what a miracle new life - a whole new person - is . . . you know you are witness to a miracle. Each child is a special gift of God and a sign of God’s presence in the world.

Of course our people have been telling the stories of this particular child for thousands of years. We all know the reaction of the elders when he was presented at the temple. We tell the story of how he amazed the teachers when at age 12 he visited the temple again - and we know that his parents insisted that he return home at that point instead of being apprenticed to a temple leader to become a religious official. And we know the stories of his life: how he called disciples, healed illnesses, reached out to marginalized people, fed the hungry with meager resources, and demonstrated that death is not the end of life.

We continue to sense his presence and influence on our world in very real ways as we live our everyday lives.

And we have begun to tell stories of what it will be like when he comes again. The second coming of Jesus has long been predicted by those who study what he said before his crucifixion. We have formed images of what the end of time might be like. And some of our expectations are as fantastic as those our forebears had when anticipating the first coming of the messiah. There are those who think the event will include punishment of all evil persons - and who define evil persons as those who are different or who disagree about religious interpretations. There are those who think the event will involve world wars and much destruction.

I have no special insight on the nature of the future, but I suspect that God continues to come to us not in the extraordinary, cataclysmic events, but in the ordinary, every day events.

There were a half dozen babies born in our congregation this year. If that isn’t enough to convince one of the goodness of God, perhaps we just aren’t paying attention. As a congregation that welcomes new members by baptism at all ages, I have had the honor of performing more baptisms in the past year than in any year of my active career as a minister, and I still have one more coming next Sunday. I’ll also start out 2016 with the celebration of baptism. If that isn’t enough to convince people that God is present and acting in this world, they need to spend more time holding those babies and looking into their eyes.

Incarnation means that God enters into our world, not that our world is somehow radically transformed into something else. God shares our common lot, understanding intimately the joys and trials of human existence. In Jesus, God fully lived a human life experiencing even human death that we might understand that we are a part of something much bigger than the span of a single generation. The shepherds to whom the angles sang the good news of Jesus’ birth were not extraordinary people. They weren’t sages or scholars or leaders of government. They were common, everyday working folks. That is the way God comes to us.

This Christmas, my advice is to look closely at the ordinary and in the ordinary open yourselves to the miracles that surround us every day. It is as easy as holding a baby. It is as wonderful as holding a baby. It is as miraculous as holding a baby.

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The Gospel of Luke is the key source of the stories of the nativity that we tell at this time of the year. We get the story of the visit of the wise men from the east from Matthew and we often quote the poetic, though somewhat esoteric prologue to the gospel of John for its imagery of light and darkness, but the storytelling is mostly based on Luke. Mark’s Gospel, of course, does not have any information about the birth of Jesus.

Around the stark simplicity of the account in Luke, there are a lot of traditions that have grown up. I’ve seen the character lists for lots of Christmas pageants that have characters that never make an appearance in the actual Biblical stories. One such character is the inn keeper. There is no such person in the Bible. The second chapter of Luke begins with a single paragraph about the birth:

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirin′i-us was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”

It is unlikely that Joseph and Mary ever appeared at any kind of a public accommodation or that there was an inn keeper in the story. Mary and Joseph would have stayed with relatives in Bethlehem and the relatives likely had a two-room home that was also accommodating other guests. The “inn” was simply the upper room. Most homes were built on a hillside and the lower room was a place where animals were sheltered overnight. Cooking and living took place in the lower room, while the upper room, or inn, was mostly for sleeping. Mary’s baby, it would have been understood by early hearers of the story, was born in the common room.

As to the presence of donkeys, sheep and cows, it is unlikely. Cows were very expensive and few people had them. The donkey is assumed, but never mentioned in the Bible in regards to the journey of Mary and Joseph. Most people got around by walking in those days and it is likely that the pair didn’t have an animal to ride. And the sheep? The next paragraph tells us that they were out in the fields in the care of the shepherds, not in the homes that particular night.

Studying the Gospel of Luke for precise details about the birth of Jesus can be frustrating because there are so few details. And the details that do appear don’t always line up. The timing of Jesus birth, according to Luke 2 was “when Quirin’i-us was governor of Syria.” That would make the date the year 6 of the Common Era. Publics Sulpicius Quirinius was the governor of Syria and Judaea after the imposition of direct Roman rule. Prior to that time, King Herod, who died in 4 BC, was a brutal and very unpopular ruler. Herod the Great was a client king who served Roman interests, but was an intermediary between the Roman authorities and the people who lived in the region.

All of that makes the exact timing of Jesus birth a bit murky, since there is about a ten year gap between the death of Herod and the rule of Quirinius. If you read the Gospel of Luke for historical accuracy, there is a discrepancy between the timing of Elizabeth and Mary’s pregnancies, though the gospel clearly indicates that they occurred at the same time.

The Gospel writers were far less interested in historical accuracy than they were in theological concepts. What is important for the Gospel of Luke, as well as that of Matthew, is that Jesus is born in Bethlehem. This fulfills the prophecy in the Book of Micah that the messiah would come from that place. Since Luke and Matthew are absolutely convinced that Jesus is the messiah, this bit of theological information is far more important than the exact year of the birth. Who is more important then when for those writers. The detail about the enrollment is placed to explain why the couple were in Bethlehem instead of Nazareth at the time of Jesus’ birth.

We don’t bother with the historical analysis when we tell the story in our generation. We aren’t thrown by what might be called inaccuracies of character and time. We try to get the main points right when we teach the story to our children. It is, however, more than just a nice story to those of use who believe. It is, for us, a piece of our history - the story that we share with many generations - that reveals the nature of God and the depth of God’s commitment to humans. Innkeeper or no inkeeper, sheep or no sheep - these are not the main points to us. 6 BCE or 4 CE or somewhere in-between, the exact date is not the critical part of the story.

What we have in Luke is the story that our people have been telling for hundreds of generations. It has survived translation from Greek to Latin to modern languages and still conveys a sense of identity to us. It has been told accurately and inaccurately and still treasured as our story. It links us with those who have gone before and we tell the story to our children in the belief that it will be told long after our time on this earth has reached its conclusion.

So our children will present that story to us once again this morning. Their costumes won’t be historically accurate. They will only partially understand the story that they tell. Their songs will be sung with enthusiasm, but perhaps without the highest refinement of repeated practice. And it will be more than good enough. It will be just right.

After all, we’re counting on them to tell the story for years to come.

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It is the time of the year when I actually read some of the mail that comes into our house. We don’t exactly have a ritual for sorting and dealing with our mail because our schedules vary quite a bit day to day, but usually Susan is the one who stops at the mailbox on her way home and picks up the mail which lands on our table around dinnertime if we don’t have evening meetings and a bit later if we do. Most of the year the majority of the mail we receive comes in the form of advertisements. We seem to receive a lot of invitations to apply for credit cards, though we have no need of additional credit cards. We get a lot of invitations to switch insurance companies, though we are not dissatisfied with our agent or the company from which we buy insurance and have been with the same insurance company for three decades now. The good folks at AARP seem to be convinced that the next letter will entice me to join their organization, but they also use a lot of different techniques to get me to open their letters. “Membership cards enclosed” with no information about what organization is involved on the outside the envelope is one of their popular approaches. “Open immediately, time sensitive materials enclosed,” is another. I’m not sure what is time sensitive about joining the organization. I know I can count on another opportunity to join at least once a month.

We still get a bit of mail for my mother, even though she passed away nearly five years ago. The cruise ship lines seem to have quite a bit of advertising aimed at people who cannot go on cruises. Mom had a lot of charities to which she donated that seem to think they might get another donation by sending her their appeals.

And then there are the catalogues from companies with whom I do business on the Internet. I don’t understand why I receive so many print catalogues from companies whose products I view online. I realize that I get a lot of junk e-mail, but the physical mail is annoying. You have to give them your mailing address in order to make the order online - they need to know where to ship the merchandise. Once they have that address, they hammer us with catalogues that are never opened. If I want one of their products, I’ll shop online, thank you very much.

So, for most of the year we do a quick sort of the mail to make sure we don’t miss many bills, of which there are fewer each year as we convert to electronic payments and e-statements, and toss most of it in the garbage.

This time of year, however, the mail actually brings things we want to read. It is the season of cards and letters from friends. We have friends with all different kinds of annual greetings. I love the cards with two or three sentences of hand-written news about family and the events of the year. We also get printed newsletters. Some of them are a couple of pages long with small print. Computers with page layout programs have produced some family newsletters with lots of pictures, headlines and other features that we didn’t see much of a few decades ago. We have a few correspondents who produce verse in rhyme, an effort that I haven’t been tempted to imitate, but which I usually appreciate nonetheless. Each year brings more and more photo collage cards, usually from a commercial printing service, with a half dozen photos and a simple greeting. Often these cards aren’t personalized, still they give us a glimpse at children who change a lot during the year, and sometimes a sense of the adventures that our friends have been taking.

I was wondering if we could sort the holiday greetings by the age of the senders. My theory is that folks who are older than us are more likely to have a printed newsletter and folks who are younger than us are more likely to have photo cards and people who are close to us in age are most likely to have an inexpensive card with a hand-written note. But it doesn’t quite work out that simply. We receive a few newsletters from friends who are younger than us and quite a few cards with hand-written notes from folks who are a bit older than us. Of course the category of “folks who are older than us” is a bit smaller each year as we become the senior generation and friends of our parents’ generation are passing on. On the other hand, I have peers who are great grandparents, something that never ceases to amaze me.

Not all of our holiday greetings come in the mail and not all arrive in time for Christmas. We have one friend who doesn’t even make an attempt, sending out an annual Valentine’s Day greeting in place of Christmas cards. In our household, we try to answer the greetings we receive and it sometimes takes us to St. Patrick’s Day to get that done.

Each year we receive more an more of our holiday greetings in email and through social media. I haven’t become very involved in Facebook, but I have found that I’m looking at it more and more because I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to. I’m amazed at how many friends use that media to send birthday and holiday greetings. I am also amazed at how many people expect that I would look at it every day, something that I haven’t quite gotten around to doing.

As annoying as much of the mail can be, and as difficult as it is to keep our dining table free from paper clutter, I guess I’m not ready to give up on the postal service. I still enjoy reading some of the things that come in the mail and this time of the year I even find myself looking forward to reading it, a sensation that I thought I had lost completely.

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There is no doubt in my mind that Mother Teresa was among God’s saints. Her service to some of the poorest people on the planet demonstrated a depth of faith and commitment to discipleship that certainly ranks her among the examples of how to live a life of faith. Her story deserves to be told not just in our generation, but for generations to come.

Having said that, I remain a bit confused about the process of the official declaration of sainthood in the Roman Catholic church. Mind you, I am a Protestant and not a member of the Roman Catholic Communion. Still, we were the same church for a millennium before we divided. We share such a long common history and so many articles of faith that it seems only natural to pay attention to our brothers and sisters in that church even as we live our lives of faith in a different part of the church.

I’m no expert, but if I’ve got it right, to become a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, a person must have lived a virtuous and holy life, and two miracles need to be attributed and confirmed to have occurred as a result of the person’s intercession with God. The two miracle policy can be reduced to a single miracle in the event that the person is martyred for their faith. I do not know the history of these rules or policies or traditions or whatever the guidelines for the beatification of a saint are called.

As I have said, I am convinced the Mother Teresa is a saint. I have no problem with making that official through the channels of the church. What confuses me is the process of determining whether or not a miracle has occurred and whether or not the miracle came about as the result of prayers of intercession or supplication issued by the person being considered for sainthood.

I do not doubt miracles. There are many events in human experience that defy human explanation. There are exceptions of the patterns of life and death and illness that are real and yet cannot be explained. God’s ways are not our ways.

What I don’t understand is the concept of cause and effect when it comes to miracles. It seems to me that a true miracle is beyond human control. If we can cause a set of circumstances to be altered, should we consider the intervention to be a miracle? Would we call it a miracle when a doctor makes an accurate diagnosis and outlines a plan of treatment that results in healing? Would we call it a miracle when an engineer makes accurate calculations and prevents tragedy by intervening and reinforcing a structure so that it doesn’t collapse? Would we call it a miracle when a software designer comes up with an application that increases longevity and quality of life?

There are so many amazing things that occur in human experience, so many unexpected events that we have witnessed, that I am tempted to say that miracles are far more common than the church declares. Still, I am reluctant to say that a human can cause a miracle to occur.

It appears to this outsider that the process within the Roman Catholic Church is one of determining whether or not the prayers of an individual are directly related to the miraculous healing. In the case of Mother Teresa, the latest miracle attributed to her intercession with God is the inexplicable 2008 recovery of a Brazilian man who was diagnosed with multiple brain tumors. My question is not about whether or not he recovered, nor is it about whether or not Mother Teresa prayed for his healing. It is just that there were probably hundreds, perhaps thousands of others who also prayed. How can it be determined which prayer is the intercession with God that sparked the miracle?

More importantly, what do we say to the grieving families of those whose tumors were not healed and who have died leaving behind loneliness and loss and sadness? Are miracles capricious? Do some people get them while others are denied? Do you have to come in contact with a person on their way to sainthood in order to obtain healing? If so, how could you possible know who to contact for the prayer you need?

I think is possible that things work in an entirely different way. I think that it is possible that a miracle occurs within the community when we join together in prayer, even if the things for which we pray don’t come to pass.

I know that I am no saint. I doubt that I could qualify for the “having lived a virtuous and holy life” part of the requirement. But I have been witness to miracles. And I know that not every miracle is the result of getting the things I think I want. When my father was dying as the result of brain tumors, the miracle wasn’t the restoration of his health. It wasn’t the prevention of his death before his 60th birthday. It wasn’t the prolongation of his life so that he could meet our first-born child. The miracle was the love and support of the community. It was the way that my home town provided care for my mother and youngest brother. It was the outpouring of love and support for the rest of us. It was in the response of the congregations I was serving at the time and their generosity of spirit. It was my learning that when you have no words for your prayer the prayer continues, and it is especially important to know that you aren’t the only one praying. There were plenty of miracles. But we didn’t make them happen. They weren’t caused by the quantity or quality of our prayers.

I guess I’m willing to say that there are plenty of saints whose lives have made a difference in the faith of others and who have lived lives of discipleship. Many of those saints will never receive official confirmation from the Vatican.

The business of official determination of who is and who is not a saint seems to be important only to a few folks in a particular corner of Christ’s church. From God’s perspective, the family of saints is much bigger than the list in the official records of the church.

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Thirty years after defeating the Galactic Empire, Han Solo and his allies face a new threat from the evil Kylo Ren and his army of Stormtroopers. That’s the story line of the new Star Wars movie that will have its US premier tomorrow. Well, it isn’t actually the premier. It is the first time that the general public will be able to get a look at the movie. There was a showing in Los Angeles on Monday, then director JJ Abrams and cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisheer, Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver and Lupita Wyong’o flew from Los Angeles for a gala premier event in Leicester Square in London on Wednesday night. A procession of stromtroopers, led by Darth Vader, marched down the red carpet before the stars arrived.

The Star Wars franchise has been a part of the culture of the world, especially the English-speaking portion of the world for four decades now. Creator George Lucas has, in many different interviews, discussed how the story of Star Wars movies is essentially the Hero’s Journey, based on the extensive research of Joseph Campbell. Campbell’s world-famous classic study, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” lays out the basic morphology of a human struggle with a prevailing hero that is at the core of so many stories told by so many generations of humans. Campbell’s claim is that the structural elements of the hero’s journey are consistent throughout the world, in many different languages and cultures because it is rooted in human psychology. Expanding on the ideas of Freud and Jung, Campbell explores the meaning and structure of myth. In a sense, he claims, we all live a hero’s journey and we find meaning in our lives based on the principles of this journey.

He explores tales of physical action as well as moral decisions and actions that play around the central theme of how humans discover within themselves the power to live beyond themselves - to sacrifice for the good of others and in the sacrifice discover the true meaning of life.

I am not a big fan of movies and television. We don’t watch much of either. I don’t think I have been to a movie theatre in the last couple of years and about the only time I watch movies is when we are with our children. I know that movies are powerful communications tools and incredible artistic expressions. I also know that the process of creating a movie is so expensive that it makes the media of expression unaccessible to the majority of the world’s people. To put it simply, there is so much meaningful artistic expression in the world that a lifetime is too short to take it all in. Having only one lifetime, I’m likely to choose a book or a visit to a gallery over a movie. I don’t mean to be judgmental in my approach. I am not opposed to movies and television shows. I don’t mind that others make a big deal about them. I simply make other choices about how I use my time.

Having said that, I have watched all six of the previously-released Star Wars movies in theaters. Since I don’t watch many movies it is possible that these movies have made a deeper impact on my life than many others. I used to listen to the music from the movies many times as I drove from place to place or worked in my garage.

I’m not eager to be among the first to see the new movie. I suppose that I will go see it some time, especially if I have an opportunity to do so with a family member or close friends. You won’t, however, find me waiting in lines. Despite the conscious efforts of George Lucas and the scholarly studies of Joseph Campbell, I don’t think that all hero journey stories are the same. Campbell writes, “Whether the hero be ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, gentile or Jew, his journey varies little in essential plan. Popular tales represent the heroic action as physical; the higher religions show the deed to be moral; nevertheless, there will be found astonishingly little variation in the morphology of the adventure, the character roles involved, the victories gained.”

Campbell’s ideas explain why there are several religious leaders who see the new movie as an opportunity to teach Christian values to youth. Take the youth to the movie and discuss it. Most of them are projecting fundamentalist concepts on the movie that probably were not intended by its creators. Many of them are trying to make their notions appear to be popular in the rush of a rapidly changing culture. Members of the Rapid City Young Life group is heading out in a bus to watch the movie in Denver on the Imax screen. I’m sure that the organizers of the trip are justifying the thousands of dollars and the taking of youth away from their families during the Christmas Break as the promotion of Christian values. And perhaps some youth will be inspired by the trip.

From my point of view, however, I am mystified by the promotion of stories of physical violence and killing as ways of accomplishing good in the world. In my mind the real heroes of the human adventure are those who answered violence with nonviolence, war with peace, hatred with love. If the warrior is the classic of the hero’s journey as Campbell claims, then there is another journey. The journeys of Mahatma Ghandi, of Martin Luther King, Jr., of Nelson Mandella and Desmond Tutu intrigue me more than the stories of those who succeed in war.

I don’t expect to ever have the audience or the impact of those who make the movies and are the topic of headlines around the world. I don’t aspire to their level of fame or fortune. I am, rather, a disciple of a different kind of hero: a baby born in humble surroundings who never took up a weapon and never fought a battle; a man who listened to those with deep need and offered healing; a man of great personal power who humbly submitted to the civil authorities even when they threatened to kill him, a human who embodies God’s love not only to those who met him in his lifetime, but to those of us born millennia later; a man who suffered and died and showed us that death is not the end.

It is, I am convinced, a story that will continue to be told long after the furor of the movies has died down and the writings of Campbell have been forgotten. And it is a story that continues to change the lives of all who hear it.

When I hear or tell that story it is not the same as all of the other stories.

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It appears that winter storm Echo has left us with a much smaller impact than other areas. We got a few inches of snow, which was layered on top of freezing fog, so the streets got slippery, but the snow has stopped and the plows have already been in our neighborhood. Today promises to be a rather normal day in the life of the church. We rescheduled our Church Board meeting from last night and cancelled a couple of afternoon meetings and sent employees home early, but other than that we had a pretty normal day yesterday. There was a no travel advisory for the entire county last night, but I have already seen vehicles out and about on Sheridan Lake Road.

I suspect that the school district won’t garner too much criticism for the decision to cancel school yesterday. The streets were slippery and it was particularly rough around the time that school would have been getting out.

It is a no win situation for school administrators. Fail to cancel when the roads are slippery and you are accused of compromising safety. Cancel and the weather passes a bit to one side or the other and you are accused of not being serious about the education of the district’s children and youth. Chances are that whenever weather threatens school administrators will come in for criticism.

I personally hate having to make the decisions for the church. I’ve never gotten used to it even after many years of experience. My instinct is to go ahead and have the activities despite the weather and allow people to make their own decisions as to safety and whether or not to attend. I don’t like the idea of someone coming to the church and finding the doors locked. Yesterday, when things were slippery, a craft group decided not to meet, but they hadn’t informed the church. We were still in the building when a participant walked in all bundled up for the cold. The message had not been delivered to one participant. We were able to offer conversation and a place to warm up, but my offer of a ride home was refused. There was no danger in this case, but I was glad that at least a couple of us had remained at the office to make sure that the building would be open if anyone arrived.

Our general policy is to follow the lead of law enforcement. If they issue a no travel advisory, we cancel. If they do not, we continue with our activities. That policy doesn’t work in every situation. We have some groups with more elderly members who have to wait for assistance with snow shoveling. We have others who might choose to stay in because they have a different sense of how to respond than law enforcement officers. Sometimes one group within the church will decide to continue with activities while another will decide to reschedule.

It isn’t one of the big challenges of my career, but one where I have more second thoughts than others. I have sympathy for school administrators when making decisions about whether or not to continue with schedules.

It was a fascinating aside yesterday to watch the news as the nation’s two largest school districts responded to a threat of terror in two different ways. Both districts have responsibility for the safety of hundreds of thousands of students. Both received threats that a violent plan had already been set in motion with guns and bombs inside numerous classrooms. Recent terror attacks that pushed the limits of what we had considered possible have left most in this nation eager to err on the side of caution. Still shutting down a major school district with thousands of buildings and entire transportation systems is not a small matter.

New York officials kept their schools open yesterday, calling the threat an amateurish hoax that imitated a popular television series. Los Angeles closed every school in the district, disrupting the lives of the families of more than 640,000 students.

It appears that the incident was a hoax designed to disrupt school. If so, it worked for that purpose. There was an expensive disruption. By the time you factor in the lives of teachers and other school district employees, more than a million people were affected by the decision. Los Angeles Superintendent Ramon Cortines will come in for a lot of criticism in the next few weeks, especially since he made a different decision than was made in New York.

As a nation, we’re all on edge. The threat of terrorism and the range of possible responses is the topic of discussion in many circles. It was the focus of the Republican Presidential Debate last night. I could have watched the debate on television, as I was at home, but simply didn’t find the option of watching television to be interesting at all. I caught a bit of the headlines from the Internet this morning, but don’t think that the discussion provided any credible new options or dynamic new situations to the fear that has come in the wake of recent attacks.

I receive invitations to events that purport to assist churches in developing emergency response plans in the event of an attack. I have so far resisted a tack taken by some congregations of establishing security perimeters, hiring armed guards, screening worship participants and other measures. Our approach to maintaining sanctuary is based on individual relationships. We work hard to get to know the people who come to our building. We welcome visitors and greet them in a manner that allows for relationships to begin from their first entrance into the building. We get to know each other well enough for trust to develop.

I’v been told that our approach is naive. It is, however, our business to provide a safe place for our activities while welcoming strangers and reaching out to the entire community in love. I can’t speak for the other members of our congregation, but I feel extremely safe in our facility. I don’t feel the need for guards and additional security measures.

I do, however, have empathy for those who have to make the hard decisions in other and larger institutions. There are real advantages to being relatively small and focusing on personal relationships.

“Pastor, what will you do if terrorists attack in our city?”

“I’ll be at the church, and you are welcome to join me.”

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I am a lover of dictionaries and a collector of books, but everything has its limits. While I have never ascribed to the philosophy that one should stop buying books simply because the bookshelves are full, the time has come for me to thin out the shelves. I’ve been doing a little bit of sorting, but much more will be needed. I’m trying to start by slowing the rate of purchase of new books.

One place where I don’t need to add to my collection is dictionaries. We have several, including two unabridged dictionaries that can be used to cross reference each other. The truth, however, is that I’ve turned to the computer for most of my dictionary needs. I can access the Oxford English Dictionary online and I can’t afford to own the set myself. Furthermore, the rate of evolution of the English language is so fast that printed dictionaries are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The OED is no longer going to produce printed books, preferring to distribute its resources via the Internet.

But I must admit that I was intrigued by a review that I read recently of “Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy,” by Josh Friedland. As you can tell by the title, Friedland enjoys making up new words when old ones fail to express his intentions. I think that the English language is probably already sufficient to describe our eating habits and desires, and I would recommend that a restaurant critics limit themselves to words that are already commonly understood. Still, I confess I am tempted by Friesland’s assertion that “we need new words and labels to give voice to our food obsessions and anxieties. And we especially need more words to describe gastronomic emoting.” Among Friedland’s favorites is “hangry.” The word probably needs no definition, most of us have experienced the emotion.

There already is plenty of food slang making its way into our vocabularies. The OED added “cakehole” (your mouth) and “cheffy,” (relating to the characteristic of a chef) among other words this year. And no less an authority than the Scrabble Tournament and Club Word List added “paczki,” (Polish donuts), “mojito” (a Cuban highball) and “yuzu” (a hybrid citrus fruit originating in East Asia). I doubt that I will be able to remember the correct spelling of paczki, but a 23-point word is worth a little effort to retain.

Lovers of words might remember 2015 as the year when lawyers locked horns over whether “mayo” is the same thing as “mayonnaise.” It probably doesn’t rank up there with global warming, gun control, terrorism or the Republican primary in terms of news, but Unilever, makers of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, got together with the American Egg Board and sued in an attempt to force the vegan food company Hampton Creek to change the name of their popular eggless product “Just Mayo.” Apparently the Food and Drug Administration defines mayonnaise as a mixture of vegetable oil, vinegar, egg yolk and lemon juice. The story contains e-mail leaks, dirty tricks, and the forced resignation of the chief executive of the American Egg Board. But the issue still has not been resolved. I guess we’ll have to wait at least until 2016 to find out whether mayo is the same as mayonnaise.

I’ve got quite a sweet tooth, and have thought that it might be a good idea to sample a “cherpumple,” a mixture of cherry pie, pumpkin pie, and apple pie. That way you wouldn't have to choose between the three excellent desserts, but could have them all at once. New York chief David Burke is arguing for a new name for the confection. He likes the name “turducken” that is used for a combination of turkey, duck and chicken and proposes the name “piecaken” for a new dessert that is combination of pie and cake. I’m not sure why he ends the word with “en.” I guess it is just that he thinks that piecaken would be a great next course after a meal of turducken. Then I learned of another possible dessert for such a meal. How about “pielogen?” That is a combination of pecan pie, cheesecake and a yule log welded together with chocolate buttercream. One slice of pielogen should be enough to destroy any simple diet.

I’ve been known to make fun of the French and their laws attempting to control the evolution of the language. And it seems to me that québécois can be among the most conservative when it comes to “la language francaise.” But the new official Canadian French word for “foodie” is “cuisinomane.” It definitely adds a bit of class to what had been a rather mundane word. I think that cuisinomane might just catch on. Being a native speaker of English, I have no qualms whatsoever about adopting words from other languages that I like. We’ve been doing that for millennia.

I don’t spend much time on Facebook, but I have noticed an increase in “foodspo” in that network. I know that some refer to it as food porn, but that is a rather tacky name for a beautiful picture of food. A friend posted a picture of an absolutely gorgeous birthday cake on my birthday and a couple of other Facebook friends thought that it was a picture of a cake that I got to eat. Not so. I’m trying to avoid too many sweets and my family complied with more appropriate food on my birthday. I did, however, like the picture. And I don’t think it is at all pornographic. I prefer the term “foodspo,” a combination of “food” and “inspo.” “Inspo” is a shortening of the word inspiration that has caught on in text messages and twitter.

The mention of text messages and twitter brings to mind what I see as the devolution of our language. I make a point of using complete words and, for the most part complete sentences in my text messages and twitter posts, but I may be the only one doing so. I’ve had to learn shortened and misspelled words in order to communicate through the medium. Maybe someone needs to come out with a dictionary of that particular form of slang.

Although such a dictionary is unlikely to come out in the form of a printed book, I’ve resolved that I don’t need one and it can be another book that I won’t be buying.

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After Christianity became a recognized religion in Rome back in the third century, the church been to experience explosive rates of growth. It was during that time that the rite of confirmation first appeared. There weren’t enough bishops to be present at every baptism, so the bishop would confirm the baptisms during a yearly visit. In some rural locations, the visits were even less frequent. Preparation for baptism became an elaborate process within the church. Preparation involved fasting for the six weeks of Lent, with baptism taking place on Easter Sunday. During the fourth century rates of growth were so great that a second period of fasting was added each year to accommodate the new converts. This second period of fasting was set in the late fall and its observance became known as the season of Advent. Christmas celebrations weren’t very elaborate in those times and Epiphany was probably a larger feast.

These days, Advent has been shortened to four weeks and the emphasis on fasting is not common in western congregations. There are, however, parts of Advent that have their roots in those ancient church practices. One of those ancient traditions that survives to this day is Gaudete Sunday. In the Western Church, which includes the Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Communion, many Lutheran churches and other Mainline Protestant Churches, the third Sunday of Advent is a day set aside for celebration.

The name of the day comes from the Latin translation of Philippians 4:4: “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say rejoice! The first and last words of that phrase in Latin are Gaudete, (pronounced with three syllables: gow-day-tay). The day was originally a break from the fasting with a single feast day that gave renewed energy for the final weeks of preparation for baptism.

In the contemporary church, the emphasis on joy has become an important spiritual practice. In our busy and troubled world, holidays can be a deep challenge for many people. For those who are grieving a recent loss, the holidays can be especially difficult. The old mood of celebration is broken by the heaviness of grief. Formerly pleasant memories now bring a sense of loneliness with the loss of the loved one. Furthermore the deep sadness leaves those who experience it feeling even more isolated because the rest of the world appears to be celebrating when they do not feel like celebrating.

In the face of these realities, some congregations observe “Blue Christmas.” Blue Christmas celebrations are usually observed on or near December 21 in the northern hemisphere. They are also known as Longest Night services because of the date. These services allow for open grieving, praying and healing of participants. They serve as a reminder to those who are grieving that a they are not alone in their grief. Others share the pain of the season with them.

The celebration of Gaudete Sunday takes a different approach. With the coming of the Christ Child, Christians are challenged to find a joy that is deeper than surface happiness. It is not that grief and pain and loss are banished, but rather the faithful are encouraged to look below the surface for the deeper joy that exists even in the midst of those realities. There is joy in the midst of grief. There is cause for celebration in the midst of pain. There is a deeper truth than loss. Death is not the end.

The recognition of Gaudete Sunday takes the themes of Lent and Easter and transports them into another season. The bottom line is that for Christians death is not the end. The worth, dignity, creativity, beauty and joy of life cannot be conquered by death. Even though we all will one day die from this life, God’s gift of life has the final victory.

It may seem like a strange exhibit in the midst of preparation for incarnation - the coming of God in the form of a baby. But it is most appropriate. We experienced the blending of those two life realities very acutely the year that my father died. At the time of his death my wife was pregnant with our first child, a son who was born during those first six months of our grief. Eager expectation and powerful grief were combined in our living of those days and remain combined in our memories of those times.

We are rarely allowed the luxury of experiencing a single emotion. In our human lives, our emotions are most often mixed. Tears of joy mingle with tears of sadness. We feel deep loss and deep relief in the same breath. The practices of our faith acknowledge these mixed emotions and provide a structure for contemplation of the realities of our lives. By setting aside regular times for observing these blended aspects of our lives each year, we can experience a gradual deepening of our faith. Gaudete Sunday is more deeply meaningful to me now that I am in my sixties than it was when I was in my twenties. The repetition of the observance over the years has added depth on depth of memory and meaning.

In the church, these practices have been observed for centuries. The depth of meaning is so profound that each time we celebrate, we discover a new nuance of our story. There are different names, different associations, different practices that arise from different parts of the church. Our celebrations are no longer simple and direct. They carry differences depending on the location and the story of the congregation that is observing the practice. They demonstrate the wide diversity of the church.

The two celebrations in which I participated yesterday were vastly different. Our morning observance was filled with music, with four bell anthems, vocal numbers, and a special duet. We had organ and piano and wind chimes and flute. Our choir loft was filled with musicians. The afternoon gathering of The Well, a seekers’ church was much more subdued with quiet for contemplation and a couple of rounds of sharing by each participant in response to various questions posed by the presenter. Both celebrations were deeply meaningful to me.

We now enter the final stretch of Advent. Buoyed by the recognition of the joy that lies not only deeply within, but also ahead of us, we continue our journey. Indeed the time is growing close.

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Almost every human being has a natural fear of death. That fear is a key to our survival as individuals and as a species. There is a rare condition, called Williams syndrome, which is a genetic disorder with number of symptoms. Children and adults who have this syndrome love other people, and are literally pathologically trusting. They have no social fear. Researchers theorize that this is probably because of a problem in their limbic system, the part of the brain that regulates emotion. There appears to be a disregulation in one of the chemicals (oxytocin) that signals when to trust and when to distrust.

For most of us, however, fear is a normal and useful part of life. It keeps us from engaging in behavior which can cause injury or death. It helps us to make wise decisions in social situations. An appropriate dose of fear can keep a person from getting into a car with a drunk driver, from crossing a busy street without the protection of a traffic signal, from going too close to the edge of a cliff, and from a host of other dangers.

Most human beings have systems to regulate their fear that allow them to use the emotion in a way that enhances life. There are numerous stories of people overriding their fear for great good. We have stories of soldiers in battle risking their own safety and even their own lives in order to protect others. We know of parents sacrificing their lives to save a child. There is a human capacity to both experience and to overcome fear.

There are, however, a host of human disorders that result in inappropriate responses to fear. In addition to Williams syndrome, in which fear is not experienced, there is an opposite condition, paranoia, in which there person experiences anxiety and fear to the point of irrationality and delusion. To put it simply, extreme paranoia is fear that exists when no threat or danger is present. There are many different degrees of paranoia. Simple phobias are irrational fears that can cause someone to avoid a particular activity, but may not disrupt an entire life. Full blown paranoia often includes false accusations and a general distrust of others that can be debilitating.

There are also types of fear that occur when danger is present, but which produce an irrational response to the danger. Recently there have been several studies of a parasite that suppresses fear of cats in rats. The parasite literally causes the rat to engage in self-destructive behavior in order to complete its own life cycle. This same parasite can infect humans and has been linked to aggressive driving and other self-destructive behavior.

It appears that our fear can save us from danger, but that it also can drive us towards danger as well.

Another irrational fear, labeled as a phobia in psychological research, is xenophobia - the fear of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange. The Oxford English Dictionary defines xenophobia as “deep-rooted, fear towards foreigners.” Xenophobia has its roots in the fear of death. A person feels that others, especially those who are different, somehow present a threat to one’s continued existence. Most people are able to manage their fears in such a way as to be able to overcome them in order to discover that difference can be enriching as well as frightening. Sometimes facing and overcoming one’s fears can open up new possibilities for meaning. Stepping out of one’s comfort zone can be a deeply enriching experience.

Public events can cause fear to be expressed in wildly different ways. Some people react rationally, others react in irrational manners. Major events, such as attacks by terrorists can inspire both courage and fear and result in the demonstration of a wide variety of responses, some of which are helpful, others which cause harm.

Despite the fact that some people are endowed with courage and the ability to overcome fear, most of us experience a loss of control when extreme fear is present.

And so we find ourselves in the midst of a kind of flight or fight free for all in the wake of recent terror attacks. As a nation, we seem to be unable to manage our own terror. Whereas some threats have historically produced unity, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at the beginning of the United States entry to World War II, other threats produce disunity and even disfunction.

The goal of terrorists is to cause disfunction. They believe that a single act can have an increased impact because people will literally become dumb with fear.

In the wake of the San Bernardino shooting, a terrorism expert named Jessica Stern wrote the following wise words in The New York Times:

“If we are to prevail in the war on terrorism, we need to remember that the freedoms we aspire to come with great responsibilities. And these responsibilities involve not just fighting terrorists, but also managing our own terror.”

She writes of terror management theory:

“The theory says that when people are reminded of their mortality — especially if the reminder doesn’t register consciously, as happens after a brutal act of terror — they will more readily enforce their cultural worldviews. If our cultural worldview is xenophobic, nationalistic or moralistic, we are prone to become more so. Hundreds of experiments, all over the world, have confirmed these findings.”

The problem is that it can affect not only individuals, but individuals can cause others to be affected as well. Applying Stern’s theory, then, it is understandable that presidential candidate Donald Trump has become a caricature of himself. He is managing his own fear of death by becoming even more certain of his worldview. Tragically his worldview is xenophobic. More tragically, he has a really big megaphone with which to amplify his particularly hateful way of coping with his fear.

As dangerous as is his worldview, there are many who turn to the comfort of blanket beliefs in the face of danger. Whenever any one of us wants to assume that all people in any category, whether they be all Muslims or all NRA-members or all people suffering from mental illness, we increase the impact of the terrorist’s attacks.

The answer lies not in more fear, but rather in reaching out. Xenophobia is countered by acts of curiosity and neighborliness. Community is strengthened by diversity.

May we learn not only to resist terrorists, but also to manage our own fears.

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Here’s your traffic tip of the day. I’m thinking that most of the regular readers of this blog will have no trouble complying with my advice. Today would be a good day to avoid downtown San José in Costa Rica. If you do have to drive in San José, be sure to allow a lot of extra time. There will be delays, detours, and heavy traffic. Paseo Colón and Agenda Segunda will be closed beginning at noon. Actually, if you are used to driving in San José, you are probably used to detours and delays. But, seriously, it will be worse today. This evening, beginning at Parque La Sabana, there will be the biggest holiday parade of the year, Festival de la Luz. They know how to put on a parade in Costa Rica. There will be big, elaborate, lighted floats, marching bands - lots of marching bands, and cheerleading squads. There are competitions for prizes in each of those categories. All will be decorated with portable lights - lots of lights. It is, after all, the Festival of Lights.

Costa Rica is officially a Roman Catholic nation. Even with the state religion, there is no ban on other religions, but the Roman Catholic church receives governmental support, including financial subsidies for buildings and programs. No one makes any apologies for state promotion of a particular religious group. Parades and festivals with religious origins and meanings are sanctioned. Christianity has been a part of the culture of Costa Rica since Christopher Columbus first visited that country. Subsequent waves of Spanish visitors and settlers have left their language and religion deeply ingrained in the lives of the people.

Christmas, of course, is a time for many celebrations and the season that immediately follows Christmas, Epiphany, is the season of light. There are lots of references to light in the Christmas story, most notably the prologue to the Gospel of John which declares, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”

The fascinating thing about the Festival of Lights in Costa Rica is that it isn’t an ancient tradition. It is a modern festival. The parade was first held in 1998, about the same time that our city held its first Festival of Lights parade. I guess I’m turning into an old timer, but the Rapid City Festival of Lights was a project of the Leadership Rapid City class of which I was a member and I served as a member of the planning committee and a parade volunteer in the early years of our celebration.

The celebration here, and in Costa Rica, doesn’t carry, for me, much of a religious impact. There is a vague association with a Christian holiday, but the events of the parade are largely secular. I haven’t got anything against secular celebrations and the lights and sounds of a night parade are a lot of fun.

It is just that I prefer a quieter and more intimate celebration of the holiday.

It looks a lot like the festival of lights just driving up our street these evenings. Some of our neighbors have invested quite a bit in festive holiday lighting. The displays of outdoor decorations include lights on homes, lights on trees, inflatable figures, stars, Santas, deer, and a lot more. Artificial deer always bring a smile to my face. We have eight or nine deer in our lawn at the moment, but they’ll get up and wander over to the neighbor’s place as soon as it is light. They just like to lie down and chew their cuds in the early morning hours. We haven’t felt the need of artificial deer since living in this neighborhood.

I have no objection to the decorations. I appreciate the investment and work involved in decorating. There are some decorations that I understand better than others. I understand nativity sets. I even get Santa Claus displays. But I am uncertain what the meaning of lighting up the outline of one’s house is. Does the size or shape of one’s house demonstrate something about the depth of one’s faith? Or is the narrow fascia just a convenient place to attach lights?

We aren’t much for outside Christmas decorations. And we tend to wait a lot later than our neighbors to do our interior Christmas decorating. Since we celebrate Christmas for twelve days beginning on December 25, we don’t want to take down our tree before New Years, as most of our neighbors do. So we put it up a bit later to assure that it stays fresh through the celebration.

The main thing for me is that Christmas isn’t about show. I don’t need to compare myself with the neighbors in order to have a season of genuine celebration. One of the very favorite things about Christmas for me is slipping out of our driveway late on Christmas Eve to go to the church for our 11:30 worship. We tell the story, sing some carols, celebrate Holy Communion and ring the church bell at midnight. It is usually a small group that gathers and the church is quiet with just a little piano music. The pageants and costumes and big candlelight events are over. The calm of the season gives time for contemplation and reflection. With that service, Christmas begins for me each year.

Advent, in our culture, is filled with rushing and crowds and parties and marketing. The weight of the ads in the newspaper exceeds the actual news most days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. My life is busy during Advent as well. There is a lot of preparation required for the events and activities of the season.

At this time of the year I begin to long for Christmas. I yearn for peace and quiet and I know I won’t be disappointed. I’m quite sure that the longing is exactly what I should be feeling.

So I won’t be going to Festival de la Luz in Costa Rica. I’ll probably stay home this evening. I might even sneak in a few moments of quiet in anticipation of that which lies ahead.

Advent blessings to you!

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We like to talk about modern medicine because of the amazing advances in the practice of medicine in the past century. Breakthroughs in the use of antibiotics, in surgical techniques, and in diagnostic equipment have resulted in the ability of doctors to conduct procedures that cure certain illnesses, prevent other illnesses, and extend the life expectancies of millions of people.

However, it seems to me that future generations will see what we call “modern” as very primitive. Just as we are aghast at some of the medical techniques of the past, such as bleeding patients, surgery without anesthesia, and the lack of basic hygiene and cleanliness in medical practices, as barbaric and uneducated, future generations may well see the way that medicine is practiced in our world as uninformed and archaic.

As much as we have learned, we lack knowledge of some of the basic functions of the human body. Modern medicine has a chemical bias. Doctors are trained in chemistry as a basic requirement of their practice, but in general know much less about the body’s electrical functions. A heart arrhythmia is basically an electrical malfunction, but the first line of treatment in virtually every medical practice in the world is a chemical treatment. There are some electrical treatments, such as pacemakers and internal defibrillators, but they are seldom used without the presence of a chemical flood. In the practice of neuromedicine, a similar practice is common. Brain diseases are first treated chemically and the understanding the electrical side of the brain is even more primitive than our concept of how the heart works. Despite years of research, we know very little of the basic biology of emotions, and our treatment of emotional disorders is generally accompanied by chemicals that affect what we know about a relatively small number of chemicals in the brain. Altering the “chemical soup” present in the brain almost always produces side effects, some of which are considered to be more intrusive and debilitating than the original condition being treated. We humans are neither purely chemical nor purely electrical, but medicine not only has a bias towards chemical interventions, it also encourages specialization that separates those who are expert in electrical treatments from those practicing chemical medicine.

I am confident that continued medical research will address some of the unbalances and provide more comprehensive understanding of human biology. There are, however, other deep issues with the practice of contemporary medicine. Chief among them is the centralized medical model. Virtually all medicine in the world is delivered through a system of centralized hospitals and laboratories. These are primarily located in urban areas and generally operate at very high cost. Medical facilities tend to be among the most expensive buildings to construct, with highly specialized infrastructure. Research hospitals, where innovation occurs, tend to be located in conjunction with major universities and distant from the homes of many people. Many people don’t have access to these resources. There are over 4 billion people on the planet today who don’t have access to basic health care. World population stands at 7.3 billion. That means that more than half of the world has no access to modern health care. Those people aren’t all located in third-world countries far from us. Some of them live in rural and isolated areas of our own state.

Part of the solution to that enormous problem may come from advances in nanotechnologies. The miniaturization of diagnostic equipment holds the promise of a medical system that is less institutionalized, less centralized, than the way medicine is currently practiced. Nano-bio-physics is a field of study that crosses traditional lines between engineering and medicine, and, in contrast to the chemical bias of current medical education, involves disciplines of learning that are not emphasized in medical schools.

For about 20 years, scientists and engineers have been working with tiny machines that read and write information in DNA. Instead of conventional computer hard drives or flash memory units, the place for the storage of information is basic biology: DNA. The discovery of some of the basic physics of life has produced the ability to create tiny machines that access information, store it in molecules of DNA and are able to read the information when needed.

Conventional thinking is that most of the information about human biology is stored in the sequence of DNA or RNA. Millions of dollars and huge amounts of research was applied to understanding that sequence. Genetic medicine has produced a new generation of much more individualized treatments for some diseases and promises major breakthroughs in oncology and other fields in coming years. Recent research, however, is demonstrating that we are far more complex than a simple sequence. There is also information in the environment around DNA and RNA that affects the information that is stored in those molecules. For example, you can have two identical twins with exactly the same RNA and genetic structure. Both may have a gene associated with cancer and one may develop the disease while the other does not. What is the difference? It is not the gene sequence, but rather the environment in which the genetic information is transmitted. Changes in the molecular environment create changes in the physical characteristics of DNA and RNA. Light can be used to stretch the molecules. Other physical changes can reduce stress on individual strands of DNA and RNA increasing their ability to transmit information.

This knowledge is leading to the development of simple, portable devices that can be used to diagnose diseases without the need for centralized laboratories. Comparatively inexpensive devices now exist that can accurately diagnose HIV, Flu, Ebola, TB and Malaria. Whereas conventional chemical diagnosis of TB, for example, can take up to two weeks and require multiple trips to a medical facility, these devices can, from a small blood sample, produce an accurate diagnosis on the spot. Treatment can begin immediately instead of requiring weeks. Ebola virus can be detected before patients show symptoms without the need of a centralized hospital or clinic.

Our technologies are not the only solutions to the problems of the world, but they hold great promise for democratization of certain aspects of life. Cell phone technology has provided communications access to many who previously had no similar access. Nano technologies may provide health care to millions who currently have no access to it.

The bottom line is that we still have so much to learn and much innovation will be required for progress to occur. The way we have always done it simply isn’t good enough for the realities of the world in which we live.

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My life is busy and I often don’t have much time for hobbies, but I have always pursued a wide variety of recreational activities. One of the things I have enjoyed over the years is making boats. I started out with a woodstrip canoe that was constructed from materials obtained at local lumber yards and hardware stores. I later modified that boat to accommodate a sail, leeboards and rudder so that it can be sailed as well as paddled. The major motivation for building the boat was that I wanted a canoe and I couldn’t afford the price of a new canoe at the store. I could have shopped around for a used boat. They are often available at very low prices. Somehow, the idea of making a boat from scratch for a couple of hundred dollars seemed like a more appealing plan. The boat has some flaws, but it still seaworthy and good to go nearly 25 years later.

Later I decided I wanted a smaller solo canoe, so I built one. That was followed by a kayak that is the boat I use the most when paddling. That kayak has been in the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Bay of Fundy, the Puget Sound, the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron and a host of other small bodies of water around the United States. It has traveled thousands of miles on top of our pickup. I’ve made various repairs over the years and the boat hardly looks like a showpiece, but I still get a lot of positive comments when I take it out on the water.

More canoes followed. When our grandson was born, I decided to make a row boat on the rationale that his parents might be more comfortable with him riding in a boat that was less tippy when he was young. The boat is a small yawl with a beautifully shaped wineglass transom with our grandson’s name on it. We’ve had a lot of fun rowing that boat around in sheltered waters.

When his sister was born, I started a woodstrip expedition kayak. She is 18 months old and that boat is still a work in progress in our garage. I have tried some things with the inlay of three different kinds of wood that requires a fair amount of patience. It should be in the water sometime next spring.

But I got a letter a couple of weeks ago that set me off on another project. Now I have two boats in process. Here’s how it began.

The letter, on yellow paper, with a four-year-old’s capital printing simply says: “TED CAN YOU MAKE A SAIL BOAT PLEASE? ELLIOT” Elliot is our grandson. Of course the answer is “yes!” I have dreamed of the day when our grandson would ask me to make a boat for him. I immediately wrote back with some questions about size and color. His response now has prompted me to move on to the model phase. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read my blog, so help me keep the surprise. I’ve got a foot long model boat with a blasted keel and spars made out of dowels that is ready for paint. I’ve discussed colors with our grandson and it will be a Christmas present for him. The model should sail fairly well with a mainsail and jib and a rudder mounted on copper wires so it will stay in a fixed position. We should be able to set it in a pond and the wind will carry it in a straight line. It will be able to sail fairly well at most points of sail.

The model, of course, is just the first phase. A four-year-old is a bit young to learn to sail, though he is getting the hang of a greenland paddle in our canoe excursions and he’ll be ready for his own paddle by next summer. After he masters a few strokes, he’ll make a good bow partner for short trips. In the meantime, we can continue to plan a small sailboat that will carry three or four people.

Our grandson lives near the Puget Sound in Washington State and his city has a fairly active Sea Scouts program. I’ve watched the young sailors making their way around the sound as I have paddled my kayak during visits to their city. When he is ready, our grandson has a grandpa who will be very happy to fund sailing lessons if that is what he wants.

The other boats that I have made live with us. In fact we have too many and I have arranged to donate a canoe to a nearby nature preserve and will probably be seeking new homes for a couple more next summer. However if a sailing dinghy comes into being it will need to live at our grandson’s home. Perhaps a light weight aluminum trailer will be suitable to carry it back and forth to the water with a small family car. Storage will be a bit of a problem. I can make a cover, but boats still take up space.

Those are all problems for the future, however. I haven’t even begun to build a full size boat. I plan to stretch out the design phase for several years while our grandson grows and refines his own likes and desires. Who knows? He may not find sailing to be as much fun as he now envisions. Certainly he will discover other passions and joys. The last time we visited his home we did a little paddling, but the thing he was loving the most was his new bicycle. He and grandpa went on several wonderful bike rides and it is a good thing grandpa has a pickup to haul boats and bikes and lots of other gear.

From the first days when I became involved in a water sports program at a church camp, I have known that boats are, for me, all about relationships. A teenager in a canoe will talk about the meaning of life and his or her dreams and fears in a way that cannot always be accomplished in other settings. Small boats enable us to go places and see things from a fresh perspective.

Already my love of boats has produced a wonderful correspondence with my grandson in an era where people don’t write many letters. I count myself among the most fortunate of people and I’ve been saving all of the letters.

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Over the years, I have read various articles about Douglas Tompkins. He seemed in some ways to be a free spirit and a complex thinker, a successful businessman and an explorer of a different way to live. I was intrigued by a contemporary, who was only slightly older than I. The son of a decorator and antiques dealer living around New York City, he was expelled from a prestigious Connecticut boarding school at age 17. A few years later, when I was 17, I left my high school without graduating. Tompkins’ teen years were embroiled in confrontations with authority, but he had the luxury of access to a bit of his parents’ wealth and more options than other high school drop-outs.

He headed west, became a ski bum and adventurer. He married his first wife and they went into the business of selling high-end outdoor equipment imported from Europe in San Francisco. The company they formed was called North Face and it produced a fair profit for the couple, who sold their business after 5 years, before it became the outdoor clothing giant that it is today.

From there he went to Patagonia to go mountain climbing and the film he made of the trip, Mountain of Storms, has become a classic among the climbing community.

Over the years there were plenty of stories about his outdoor adventures - most of which were beyond the budget of everyday skiers and outdoor players like myself. We admired his trips, but knew that we couldn’t afford them. There was a time in my life when the thought of skiing all year around by traveling back and forth between Chili and the US and Canada sounded appealing. Reality, however, prevented me from such a choice.

It didn’t slow down Tompkins, who seemed to have a knack for making money as he adventured around the world. He and his wife started a women’s dress business selling clothes out of the back of a Volkswagen mini van. The clothing line became Esprit de Corps, later shortened to just Esprit, and it made them millionaires.

Tompkins divorced his wife and sold his shares of Esprit for a reported $150 million.

Form there he went into the business of ecology. Having read “Deep Ecology: Living asIf Nature Mattered” by George Sessions and Bill Devall. The book calls for a radical restructuring of human society to bring it into harmony with nature.

He began to purchase large tracts of land in Chile. He married Kristine McDivitt, former CEO of Patagonia, another outdoor clothing firm. He formed the Conservation Land Trust, which bought up hundreds of thousands of acres in Chile and Argentina to be maintained as wilderness. His moves were suspect by the natives, who weren’t entirely comfortable with a foreigner buying up their land. There is no shortage of wealthy foreigners who buy up land at Chile’s comparatively low prices. People from other countries have made millions from logging, mining, hydroelectric projects and other extractive industries. People couldn’t figure Tompkins out. He seemed to be opposed to every development project that promised to raise the living standards of the local people.

These days his attempts to preserve the land are less controversial in Chile.

Meanwhile Tompkins continued with his adventures. He was kayaking on Child’s General Carrera Lake with a group of five others yesterday when strong waves caused the boats to capsize. He had traded winter for winter traveling for summer fare and the Chilean springtime bought out the desire for a wilderness adventure. And adventure always comes with risk. I don’t know how long the boaters were in the water. I don’t know if they had wet suits or dry suits to extend the time they could survive. I do know how easy it is to push beyond one’s limits in a kayak. You can paddle farther and got to places that are too remote for rescue if you have to spend any amount of time in the water. And, having passed the age of 60, I know how quickly one can become rusty at outdoor survival skills such as rolling a kayak. Once you make a wet exit, you don’t have much time before hypothermia sets in.

Whatever happened, Tompkins is now dead. Wealth and experience weren’t enough to keep him alive in the frigid waters. A military patrol boat rescued three of the kayakers while a helicopter lifted out the other three. He was airlifted to Coyhaique where he died in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

Unfortunately it is a story that has repeated itself too many times. The list of outdoor adventurers who finally come up against the limits of their sport in a fatal way is long. That reality won’t deter other adventurers. There will be no shortage of people who admire Tompkins and even think that the means of his death are far more preferable than dying of disease or the effects of old age. Tompkins lived fully and died doing what he loved in a place he chose.

I have no expertise to provide additional commentary on the meaning of his life, only a the observation that enjoying nature doesn’t require one to push the limits of safety. I have no less joy because I paddle in small and sheltered waters. I am no less inspired by the beauties of nature because I now hike on stable trails instead of gearing up for rock climbing. I am no less committed to living responsibly even though I cannot afford to own large tracts of land to keep them from commercial development.

Still, I know that life has its risks. Driving my car to and from the lake is probably statistically more risky than the type of kayaking he was doing at the time of his death. An accident can occur to any one of us. Whether we make it to seventy, eighty, ninety or past 100, life is short. Living without risk isn’t possible. What we can control to a certain extent is the level of risk.

Tompkins was famous. His death is making all of the big newspapers. It isn’t so with other risk takers.

For all of you, be careful out there. Gear up. Keep rescue plans at the top of your list of preparations. We count you when you head out on your adventures and count you when you return, hoping to get the same number each time.

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It has been a little more than 35 years since my father died. I think of him a lot, however. For the most part the memories are pleasant and I am grateful for the things that he taught me in the time that we had together. I was fortunate to have been born into a family with a good marriage at its core and a wonderful love for children. Although my folks didn’t have the highest levels of education, they had a deep love for and respect of education and made education a priority for their family.

Sometimes I imagine being able to talk to my Dad about the world in which we live today. He would have been impressed with the computers that we use. He died just before the advent of personal computers. He was impressed with the capabilities that were being designed into hand-held calculators and the computing technology that made the first moon landing possible. He could see the possibilities of computers for every-day life. He would definitely be impressed with the computers we use and the tasks that they perform in our everyday life. None of us could imagine the Internet in those days. It was several years after his death before I began using e-mail and it was a slow and sometimes frustrating experience in the early years before we had high speed Internet connections. Our first attempts at computer communications, using the standard telephone lines and very slow modems, meant planning carefully and keeping messages short. Still, he would have loved the concept.

He would be completely impressed with our smart phones and mobile devices. I didn’t have a cell phone until more than 15 years after he died, and that was a rather primitive device compared to the phones we take for granted today.

My father would be pretty impressed with my car. During his lifetime getting a car to last for 100,000 miles was a real feat, and rarely occurred with the rough use to which our vehicles were subjected. The car I use as a daily driver has nearly 250,000 miles and I will not be surprised to drive it another 100,000 miles before deciding to replace it. It is dependable and reliable and I’ve worried less about whether or not that car will start than was common with the cars we drove back during my father’s lifetime. I remember thinking we had accomplished something when we could get 15,000 miles on a set of tires. Now I think there is something very wrong if my tires don’t last me 50,000 miles and on our car, I expect 75,000 miles out of a set of tires. Not long ago we traded pickups. The old truck had 165,000 miles on it and we had never run the spare tire on the truck. That would have amazed him.

Thinking about my dad and how he might react to the life I live is mostly an exercise of my imagination. I don’t know what he might think. I don’t know how he would react. I am just speculating based on what I know of him and the relationship we forged in the 27 1/2 years that we shared. Still, there is much of him that lives on in me. There is the simple genetics of a father and son. Children aren’t clones or copies, but we carry much of our parents in our lives. That is, of course, not a prescription. We don’t become our parents. First of all we have two parents and each child is a unique combination of the qualities and attributes of those parents.

My father had a delight in new inventions and gadgets and I know that some of the things we use would fascinate him. I carry a pressurized ball point pen that will write at any angle, has ink that writes clearly on a wet surface, and lasts much longer than a conventional pen. He would have liked that. I would have enjoyed showing it to him along with the pad of waterproof paper that I keep in my rear pocket. He’d like the tiny flashlight that I keep with me and the rechargeable batteries that power it.

It seems to me that thinking of the modern things that would delight my father is a way of measuring progress. Things aren’t the same as they used to be. And it is easy for us to complain about some of the changes. I don’t like the over-scheduling of children and youth that is a part of our world. I don’t like the rise in violence in our communities. I don’t like the fear that arises with each new attack of terrorists. I am frustrated with the increasing polarization in American politics and the ability of politicians to gain such huge amounts of money with such outlandish ideas and concepts. I can make a list of complaints about the world that seems to have no end.

All changes, however, are not bad. There are ways in which our world is getting better and there are things that help us to move forward as a community. The fantasy of giving my father a tour of life in the world as 2015 draws to a close is one way to remind myself of changes that are for good and improvements in some aspects of life today.

Change is inevitable. We can’t hold it back. And it is clear that we humans are pretty good at adapting to change. We are capable of more than just surviving in this changing world. We can discover happiness and meaning and wholeness. Part of that process is understanding our connection with those who have come before us. Ours isn’t the first generation to experience loss and grief. We aren’t the first to know love and faith, either. These things didn’t start with us and will not end when our time in this life is over. That thought brings me to one more thing that I’m sure my father would have loved.

He would have delighted in our grandchildren. He loved kids and these are amazing kids that fill me with hope continually.

I am grateful to belong to many generations of this family.

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Literature is filled with stories of couples who manage to fall in love despite animosities between their families. Some stories tell of animosities between different communities, others speak of feuds between specific families. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is mirrored in stories of the Hatfields and McCoys, West Side Story, and countless other tales. These stories didn’t begin with Shakespeare, however. There are similar stories embedded in the works of the ancients. Both Greek and Roman mythologies contain stories of people who weren’t “supposed” to fall in love, but managed to do so anyway. And they are filled with stories of hatreds and animosities that are irrational and destructive, but persist anyway.

Most families have stories that in some way mirror the literature. Well, actually it is more likely that literature mirrors real life. I have a cousin who, half a century ago, fell in love with and married a woman who grew up in a Roman Catholic Family despite our family’s heritage of Protestantism. His father, my uncle, was so angry about the relationship that he refused to go to the wedding. I remember my parents amazement at my uncle’s inflexibility and disappointment that he cut himself off from such a significant event in his son’s life. In this particular series of events, the gentle kindness and persistence of the bride finally won over the father-in-law and long before the end of his life he learned to accept the marriage and to love his daughter-in-law.

But not all of our human stories have happy endings. We can develop divisions that are painful and angers that are destructive over what might seem to others to be trivial disagreements. Although there are some who blame religion for anger, animosity and even war, I remain convinced that a world without religions would not be less violent or less divided. We humans develop deep passions, many of which are irrational, and those passions can grow into anger and anger can become violent. Tragedy of human making is a deep theme of our existence.

From my perspective as a pastor, a student of religious history, and one who is intrigued by the study of philosophies, most, if not all, of these disagreements and troubles begin inside of what were once groups of like-minded people. Christianity was a thousand years established as an institutionalized religion before the development of the great schism that divided Eastern and Western Christianity. The stream of history that gave rise to our corner of the faith was firmly entrenched in the Roman Catholic Church for more than 1500 years. It was only the divisions in the church that have been labeled the Protestant Reformation that moved us out of that stream. From our contemporary perspective, it is easy to see our similarities in belief and practice.

I am often a bit thrown by some of the members of my particular corner of the church when they react negatively to a practice, hymn, or other aspect of worship as being “too catholic.” I see the elements of our shared history not as something that we have divided up, but rather as something that we share. We may see certain practices from a different perspective, and I know that we aren’t the same, but there is so much in our faith that connects us with those whose traditions vary from our own.

I am currently working with a young couple with the planning of their wedding. She grew up in our congregation. He grew up in a Roman Catholic family. They both take their faith and their family’s religious traditions seriously. They are working to learn and understand as much as possible about each other’s faith traditions. They have taken classes and met with religious leaders. They have shed some tears and struggled with some of the differences in family traditions, attachments and passions. I am confident that despite their differences, they will find a meaningful path in this life that respects those differences and forges a life of faith for their family. I have no special ability to predict the future, but I am hopeful when I am with this couple because of their deep respect for each other and the traditions each brings to their relationship.

Differences don’t have to become conflicts.

Tragically, however, there are forms of religious fundamentalism that give rise to violence. Over and over again in the history of the church, people have become so attached to a particular interpretation of our story that they become intolerant of those who understand things differently. There have arisen, throughout our history, voices that claim that they are right and that everyone else should see things their way. These voices have given rise to acts of violence against those who dissent or disagree. Violence in the name of religion is a shameful part of our story.

Knowing this about ourselves, I am particularly sensitive to unkind words and ignorant claims when I hear them from folks in our congregation. We, too, can be intolerant of those of different faiths. We too, are capable of making statements that reflect biases and prejudices. It seems unlikely that we would take up arms and commit acts of violence, but we are certainly capable of making guests feel unwelcome and displaying forms of religious prejudice.

That is why we practice, over and over, the art of compassion and inclusion. That is why we repeat, as an element of worship, words of welcome and acceptance. We confess that we are far from perfect - that the ideal of our faith lies beyond our grasp at times. We understand that our community needs to continue to learn and grow and expand. Along the way unkind words are sometimes spoken. Unkind thoughts are sometimes expressed. We have to learn to apologize, to look at things from another perspective and to grow through our imperfections and mistakes.

God is incredibly patient with us as we travel this journey and form a community that is safe and supportive yet welcoming and open to change. Sometimes, when we get it right, we can reflect that patience as we work with each other.

Sometimes we add a new chapter to our literature of stories where love triumphs over human prejudices. We sing our songs and pray our prayers and really mean the words that we say.

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“Pastor, sometimes there is just too much going on at that church!” This was a comment from a member who is a solid supporter of the congregation and its ministries. I’ve heard similar comments from others: some members and some not. The comments just run off my back as it were. I like the church to be busy and I am proud that we have a lot going on. Our forebears didn’t build this marvelous building to sit on the hill and look pretty. They built it to serve the community.

We do, however, have some very busy times. There are sometimes when I have to invest energy in organization and logistics. This weekend has been a good example. On Friday afternoon, the women set up and decorated for the Women’s Fellowship Christmas Tea. There was already a holiday crafts sale going on in the fellowship hall to raise money for a variety of ministries and projects. A little later in the afternoon, the community handbell ensemble moved in with their cases of bells and tables and other equipment and set up in the sanctuary. They had a rehearsal from 7 to 9 that evening. Yesterday the handbell ringers were back for a rehearsal from 1 to 3 and the Christmas Tea began at 1:15. After the rehearsal, all of the bells and equipment were taken down and stored and we set up for an evening Jazz concert. The concert involved projection on the big screen that had to be set up and a piano had to be moved into place. The pianist arrived at 3:30 and began rehearsing. Around 4 pm there were folks decorating in the fellowship hall. The craft fair had been taken down and items stored. People were going up and down the steps to the basement to get things put away.

The folks serving the evening meal arrived about 5 pm and people began to arrive around 6 for hors d’oeuvres in advance of the evening’s concert. It was a festive holiday gathering. The concert began at 7 with cool jazz interpretations of classical Christmas tunes. We were celebrating a successful capital funds drive with our congregation. Our new roof is installed and there are many more improvements coming thanks to the generosity of our members and we had much to celebrate.

After the concert, we took down the screen and got ready for this morning’s worship service with the sacraments of baptism and communion in the same service. We also set up some of the things for the Advent/St. Nicholas Festival that follows worship today.

Today I need to be at church early to rehearse with the organist for the liturgy and then with the choir for the anthem before worship begins. After worship, with the Advent Festival going on in the fellowship hall, the handbell ringers will arrive to set up their tables for their concert. Call for the performers is 12:45 with the concert beginning at 2:30. As a member of the board of directors for the handbell choir, I agreed to serve as M.C. for the concert, so I’ll have to have my notes straight and be set to keep on track of that event.

Then the bells and tables need to be taken down and loaded into the trailer to be transported back to their home in another church in our community. I’ll be joining “The Well” for their gathering at 4 pm and should have the church locked up and be on my way home before 6.

I’m going to take tomorrow off.

This weekend isn’t typical. There really is no such thing as typical in our church life. It is busy. And I like busy. I also think that busy is good for our church. The bottom line is that very few people participate in every event that takes place. There are folks who attended one event yesterday who will attend another today. A few will attend a couple of events in the same day. Most will choose from the wide variety of events and participate in ways that are meaningful for them.

Of course just being busy isn’t what the church is about. We are about activities and events that are meaningful and that enhance our community. We exist to serve others, not entertain ourselves. And sometimes we need to remind ourselves of that call to service. Sometimes we get caught up in the busy-ness of activity after activity.

I sometimes forget that there are many who only sample part of the life of the church. In the past week, I’ve attended a couple of funerals, made two different calls to people in that difficult time between receiving positive biopsy results and the first meeting with the oncologist. I’ve met with committees strategizing mission projects and planning a transportation program for those in our church who are no longer able to drive. I’ve worked on the production of a newsletter and worship bulletins. I’ve been through a draft of the Christmas Eve service and discussed music with some of our guest musicians for Christmas worship. I’ve planned a baptism and recalled the baptism of the mother of this new little one. I’ve rejoiced with another couple at the birth of their first daughter. I get to see the church as a whole – a wonderfully complex and busy slice of humanity engaged in building meaning and sharing the best and worst moments of our human journey through this life.

Not everyone gets to see the richness that is apparent from my point of view. Some only see one hour a week. Others only see the events that attract people who are interested in the same things as they.

We don’t do this to impress others, however. We do this for God. And God keeps tabs on us. God knows what we’re about. God understands that in the midst of the busy there is real humanity and God is so in love with people – so interested in being in relationship with us – that God pays attention to everything we do.

And that is just right.

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OK, here is more about bananas than you want to know.

Bananas were first introduced in the United States at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of America in 1876. At the exposition, they sold for 10 cents apiece, a significant price for the times. Within a few years, there were regular shipments of bananas from Costa Rica to New Orleans and the fruit was distributed from New Orleans around the US. The fruit became popular around the country.

There are over 400 varieties of bananas grown around the world, but there are few which produce a profit when shipped over long distances. Here in the United States we have come to associate the Cavendish variety as the only type of banana. If you travel to Costa Rica, however, you will discover that Cavendish bananas aren’t very popular with the locals. A smaller, sweet banana and a very small sweet variety are probably the most popular bananas in Costa Rica. Also grown and consumed are plantain, which are a cooking banana. Cavendish are for export.

What made the long distance distribution of bananas possible was the development of varieties that would ship well. In the 1800’s large plantations were springing up in many countries around the equator. The huge farms cleared large patches of ground and planted a single variety of banana, the Gros Michel. Although they are called trees, banana plants are actually perennial herbs. The “trunks” are really tightly wound leaf. In the late 1880’s, a fungus called Panama Disease, first appeared in Australia. The fungus jumped from continent to continent and within a few decades the Gros Michel variety was decimated and there was too little production to support the distribution networks. It began to look like bananas as a world-wide fruit were doomed.

That is when the Cavendish variety was developed. Large companies like Dole and Chiquita developed cutting edge (for the time) science to essentially clone plants. The similar plants allowed for the companies to control for consistency while producing massive amounts of bananas at low cost. The new plants produced very few imperfect fruit. With each banana looking and tasting like the other, supermarkets were willing to sell the fruit because customers could learn what to expect. The Cavendish are creamy and consistent in texture, but compared to the smaller and sweeter varieties, their flavor is not very significant.

But they sell. and they produce large profits for the plantation companies.

There is a problem, however. Like the Gros Michel before it, the Cavendish is subject to plant disease and pests. Because the plants are all the same, there is virtually no resistance to disease. A disease that affects one plant will affect all of the plants.

About 50 years ago, in Southeast Asia, Tropical Race 4, a fungus that is a more potent strain of Panama Disease, began to attack Cavendish plants. It has now spread to other parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Australia. It is only a matter of time before it comes to Central America. The way in which the fruit are grown in Central America makes the crop especially vulnerable to the disease. When it comes, the existing crop will not be able to cope with or evolve to defend itself against the fungus.

Like the Irish Potato Blight of the 1800s, the world is facing a banana blight within a decade or so. Entire plantations will fail. Even if the big companies pack up in one region and move to another, the disease will follow.

When we were children we used to sing the song, “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” It grew out of the decimation of the Gros Michel bananas. We probably should keep in practice, because we are about to face another worldwide shortage, this time in Cavendish bananas.

The development of the Cavendish strain didn’t address the problem of fungus attacking banana plants. Even though the Cavendish was resistant to the strain of Panama Disease that decimated the Gros Michel crop, what occurred was the replacement of one monoculture with another. Huge plantation agriculture is especially vulnerable to disease. What is needed is not a new variety of banana - the world already has 400 varieties. What is needed is a different way of raising the fruit for commercial markets.

Although we don’t eat many bananas at our house (a subject too long for a single blog), we are aware of the banana market because we have close ties with our sister church in Costa Rica. And Costa Rica is the largest exporter of bananas to the United States. Chances are that the bananas in the grocery store came from Costa Rica. The plantation method of growing bananas is a factor in the Costa Rican economy and one of the factors that keeps wages low and working conditions poor in that country. We have a small relationship to a coffee cooperative that grows coffee together with plantains in the southern part of the country. The fungus won’t affect their plants and the cooperative will continue to consume the plantains for food for workers and area families while exporting the coffee for profit.

Bananas do a lot of traveling. Not only do our bananas travel from Costa Rica, but there are countries that export to markets even farther away. Ecuador, the world’s largest exporter of bananas, ships around the world, with a significant amount of the fruit going to China. Chinese companies play a huge role in the Ecuadorian economy in a similar way that US companies play a big role in the economy of Costa Rica.

You don’t need to start hoarding bananas right away. The pipeline from Costa Rica is running full at the moment. The fungus hasn’t yet reached Central America. But it is not a question of if the fungus comes, only of when it will come. For now bananas are inexpensive and readily available in the supermarkets.

If you like bananas, however, and if you live in a city where they can be found, try out some of the more exotic varieties available. Minis are sweeter and delightful fruit. Plantains are good for baking and cooking with a variety of other foods. Red bananas and manzanos are great to eat raw, add to salads, or bake in breads. These varieties do not appear to be subject to the fungus.

If we don’t change our ways of producing and consuming bananas, we may be singing, “Yes, we have no bananas,” for years to come.

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The time between Thanksgiving and New Years is often described as holiday season, so I’m sure that you’ve got a big celebration planned for today. It is, after all, World Soil Day. That’s right it is the day of dirt. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has a web site devoted to Global Soil Partnership that even includes a map of World Soil Day events planned around the world. The map doesn’t show much going on in South Dakota. The nearest event shown on the map is in Utah with another in Texas and events in both Spokane and Seattle Washington as well as Vancouver, British Columbia. The theme for this year’s celebration is “Soils: a solid ground for life.”

Soil is very important for sustaining life and soil conservation has been an important part of contemporary farming. During the Great Depression of the 1930’s large amounts of topsoil were eroded, primarily through wind as the drought left huge amounts of farmland without crop cover to hold the soil. The planing of shelter belts and discovery of low tillage and no tillage farming has greatly reduced the erosion of topsoil, but it is still a major issue. We’ve driven across eastern Oregon and Washington where there are huge corporate farms. On windy days the road ditches fill up with topsoil blowing off of the fallow fields.

Human well being depends on the preservation of soil. The production of our food, fuel, and fiber is dependent upon healthy soils. Clean water and resistance to floods and droughts are dependent upon rich soil.

The stories of our people are literally caught up with the stories of soil. Genesis 2:7 says, “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” There is an important wordplay in the Hebrew that doesn’t come through in many English translations. The dust of the ground is “Adamah" in Hebrew. The man formed from the dust is “Adam.” We have the language to express a similar pattern: The human was formed from the humus. The wordplay continues in the Hebrew. The breath of life is “Ewa” and the woman formed from the side of the man is named “Eve.” In that particular Biblical account of creation, Adam and Eve are literally made out of soil and breath. Wind and dirt: the basic elements of life. Water also figures deeply in the story. The place where the human is created only after “a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground.” The river that flows out of Eden to water the garden is divided into four streams and the great rivers of the region are named as having their origins in that garden.

We come from the soil and to the soil we will return. The elements of our human bodies are all natural parts of creation. We are made of the same stuff as the earth.

Now, in a time of modern science, we know that humus is not a single entity, but rather a rich and very biodiverse community of organisms that live in the soil and assist with decomposition and reconfiguration of elements into new forms of life.

In our backyard we have a couple of bins for composting and we place organic materials including table scraps, corn stalks, extra materials from the garden, grass clippings and more in those bins. We stir them from time to time and remove soil from the bottoms of the bins to enrich the garden each year. This year, after many years of using the compost, we were able to remove about 24 yards of material from the bins that we used to make some changes in our landscaping in our front yard. As I toted wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of the rich soil, I was amazed at the bounty of our simple compost piles. Without cost and with very little effort, we were able to harvest a rich bounty for our yard. Of course, there were a few weed seeds in the compost. It is, after all, a biodiverse entity.

Each year our landfill produces tons and tons of compost from yard waste. The compost is used in area parks and is available to home owners for their use. It is pretty impressive when you consider that most of our area has thin topsoil and the pine forests mean that the soil is quite acidic, not the best for rich garden yields. But with a little effort, the soils can be enriched naturally to produce a wide variety of plants including garden crops and fruit trees.

I haven’t planned a party for world soil day, but it seems appropriate to pause and reflect on the great bounty that makes our lives on this planet sustainable. Since we are made from the soil and dependent upon soil for our food, it makes sense that we show a little appreciation for the soil that provides for our being.

There is nothing new in this observation. As I mentioned earlier, the relationship between our lives and the soil is embedded deeply in the stories and traditions of our people. We have been talking about this for thousands of years. Old stories, however, can become so routine that we don’t pay attention to them unless given a reason to do so.

When we served rural congregations in North Dakota, we observed Soil Conservation Sunday in the middle of May each year. We would get litanies and bulletin resources from the local soil conservation district and use them in worship to remind our people of the connections between faith and the care of the land. It was a lesson that we didn’t really need to teach. Family farmers are among the best stewards of land from a soil conservation standpoint.

The practice of observing the connection between the land and our lives is probably more important for those of us who do not live on farms. We need to be reminded of a truth that our people have long known - a truth that our farm neighbors practice every day: soil is an important resource.

Happy World Soil Day!

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I know that there are no words to explain the violence in San Bernardino yesterday. Still, there is something in me that keeps trying to understand what happened and how such violence can be prevented. As our President said, “We have a pattern of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world.”

I am troubled by the shootings. I know that the behaviors of the shooters are irrational and there is no way to explain their actions according to the way I think.

I am even more troubled by what seems to be official indifference to the issue.

Yesterday morning, before the violence erupted in San Bernardino, a group of doctors in white coats arrived on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC to deliver a petition to Congress. Signed by more than 2,000 physicians around the country it pleads with lawmakers to lift a restriction that for nearly two decades has essentially blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on gun violence.

Get this straight: we have laws in our country that prevent our federal government from conducting research to understand the problem.

Apparently not everyone wants to figure out what is going on.

I wish someone could understand it enough to suggest plausible solutions.

The horror of yesterday’s events is intensified by the setting where the shootings took place. It was a center that provides employment, housing, and a host of other services for persons with developmental disabilities. It appears that the focus of the violence wasn’t the people being served by the institution, but rather participants in a group that were using the conference room for a social gathering. Still the horror was shared by those who serve and those who are served by the institution and their families.

I was in no way involved with the incident. I knew none of the victims. But I’m starting to take this personally. The apparent target of the shootings were employees of the county gathered for a holiday party. As a sheriff’s chaplain, I am a servant of employees of our county. The location was Inland Regional Center, a facility that serves people with developmental disabilities. In our community the comparable facility is Black Hills Works, a place where I volunteer regularly whose mission I fully embrace.

The shooting took place nearly 1,300 miles from our location. It was much too close to home.

There is no shortage of opinions on the topic in our country. I have spoken with people who believe that the solution is more weapons - that when shooters enter any place there should be armed people shooting back immediately. The thought of pitched gun battles with untrained, but heavily armed people doesn’t sound appealing to me and sounds like a recipe for increased, not decreased violence. But it is one of the possible “solutions” that I hear discussed.

What bothers me is that we don’t seem to be serious about getting information. We would rather argue about our opinions than collect solid data that could inform serious public policy. Congress has enacted laws that prevent the study of the issue.

What does it mean that we don’t want to discover the truth?

The sources I read are full of speculation about the shooters. It appears that the were a young couple, who left their baby in the care of a grandmother before carrying out what was a planned attack with serious weapons and large amounts of ammunition. They later were killed after engaging in a gun battle with police. Although some of the best crime investigators in the nation will work diligently to learn what can be learned from this particular incident, the complete motives of the shooters will never be fully known. That evidence died with the shooters.

14 people dead, 17 injured is only the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds are grieving the loss of loved ones. Hundreds more were traumatized by being forced to hide in offices, bathrooms and other parts of the facility. Many will be filled with terror at the thought of returning to that place for work or services. Some will never be able to return. An innocent child will grow up under the cloud of the heinous crime committed by parents.

And a nation will wait for the next mass shooting. It will come. So far in 2015, there have been 336 days and 355 mass shootings in the United States. A mass shooting is an incident with four or more victims including the shooter. June 13 and July 15 each saw five such incidents in our country. The San Bernardino incident wasn’t yesterday’s only event. In Savannah, Georgia, a gunman shot four people killing a woman and injuring three men. No suspect is in custody in the shooting. It barely warranted media coverage.

Big events like San Bernardino attract mass media coverage. They warrant comments from the President and commentators speaking of terrorism. The terror for individuals and families is just as great when there are only a handful of victims. The level of violence and our ability to simply live with it is astonishing to me.

I’m with the doctors who submitted their petition yesterday. This violence is a public health crisis. We need to bring the best of our minds and the best of our resources to understanding how to prevent such violence. We need to look at the differences between our country and other nations to try to figure out what makes mass shootings so much more common here than anywhere else in the world.

There will be plenty of emotional opinions and irrational fears expressed. There will be plenty of big money spent trying to influence the research. But this is a nation of good scientists with strong academic disciplines. When we make it a priority we are capable of understanding complex concepts and solving difficult problems. We have the resources to reduce the violence.

Now we need the will.

Nothing less is worthy of our time.

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When I was studying pastoral counseling, there was a distinction drawn between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy was generally defined as feelings of sorrow or pity for someone else’s misfortune while empathy was understood as the ability to share another’s feelings. The distinction is subtle, and perhaps not completely borne out by the dictionary definitions or etymology of the terms, but there is a difference between those who acknowledge another’s pain and those who share it.

I was thinking about the difference between sympathy and empathy yesterday after meeting with a congregational member who was widowed a few months ago after a long and apparently happy marriage. The journey of grief has been difficult and there is a long road ahead for this individual. Things are confused by the complexity of the situation. There is loneliness and the feelings that come from an empty home. There are feelings of remorse for things that might have been different. There is wondering about the nature of death and what happens after death for the one so beloved. On the one hand, I can assure the person that the feelings are normal and experienced by others. On the other hand, I know that each person’s grief is unique and that the nature of grief is that it increases the sense of isolation.

I try to check in with those who are grieving as they travel their journey. I want to extend the support and care of the church to them not only at the time of loss, but as they move toward recovery of some sense of balance and normalcy.

Is my interaction sympathy or empathy? I hope and believe that I am avoiding the most crass forms of sympathy where pity is expressed and there may even be a sense of relief that I am not the victim of the events that have caused another’s pain. On the other hand, I am not sure that I can achieve full empathy - the ability to fully share and understand the feelings of another. My experiences are different. I have not experienced the death of a spouse. I don’t really know what it is like to live alone. I can understand to a point, but there is something about the truly unique experience of grief that means that I don’t really know what another person is experiencing, even when that person is trying hard to explain what is happening.

Even though our experiences are different, we do share a common journey of grief, however. Having lived in community and experienced the life of deepening relationships that is a part of the church, an individual isn’t the only one who experiences loss when a death occurs. Our community - our church - has lost a beloved member. We are all grieving together. The experience is different for each person, but we share a common loss and a common grief.

Sharing another’s grief may be the best of which we are capable in this life. I believe that I am helpful when I acknowledge the reality of the pain and loss and affirm that the tears and sorrow are natural and normal parts of the process.

For practical purposes, I tend to think of sympathy as the ability to acknowledge and understand on an intellectual level the feelings of another. I’ve read a lot of books about grief and I’ve invested some time in learning about its stages and elements. I can often offer insights that the person experiencing grief does not know. Insights and understanding can be helpful.

Empathy, on the other hand, is a term for the sharing of the experience. Of course we are each unique individuals and we cannot fully share another’s emotions. On the other hand we can allow ourselves to enter into another’s feelings and experience things from their point of view.

To put it in another way. I don’t experience pain when I am sympathetic. Expressing empathy means entering into the pain and experiencing another’s pain.

I have learned that avoiding pain isn’t the most meaningful path for my life’s journey. Sometimes pain needs to be experienced in order to grow. Pain is an effective teacher. Although I wouldn’t wish pain for myself or another, I know that sometimes pain has to be confronted and experienced. Avoiding pain can also mean avoiding deep relationship. Avoiding pain can mean missing the joys of community. Grief is born out of love. If we didn’t love others, we would not mourn their loss.

By practicing empathy we open our minds and hearts to understanding not only how others experience the world, but also how our actions affect others. Empathy is the foundation of morality - of making the right choices with an understanding that what we choose affects others.

A Canadian comedy show, The Red Green Show, had a regular segment that always ended with the words, “Remember, we’re all in this together.” Those words are sage advice. When we remember our essential connection with other people, we are able to open ourselves to experiencing their pain we can become active participants in easing pain. Seeing how our behavior affects others, we can make choices to ease their pain and suffering.

For a grieving person who has lost their spouse, the feelings of loneliness can be lessened by my decision to remain an active partner with the grieving person. I can make a phone call from time to time. I can arrange a visit or offer a cup of coffee. I can invest my time in listening even when I don’t have solutions or sage advice to offer. Just knowing that “we are all in this together,” can be a comfort to another persons who is experiencing deep loneliness.

That is where our faith really shines. We affirm that God loves us so much that God becomes one of us to experience the fullness of human life. We believe that because of God’s love, we are never truly alone. Even when we cannot find human companionship, God offers divine love.

Sometimes, when I get it right, I can be an agent of that love and share it with others.

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When I work with those who are grieving, especially those who have experienced a sudden and traumatic loss, I spend a few minutes speaking with them about self care. I acknowledge that all of their routines are temporarily suspended that it is normal for their appetite to be suppressed and sleep cycles to be disrupted. I give them gentle advice about making sure to drink enough water and take care of their basic physical needs. When there are other family members, friends, or other supporters, I speak to them about providing care in the form of paying attention to eating and drinking to maintain health.

My advice may be a bit of an over reaction. People, in general, are pretty good about taking care of each other. Moreover, people respond to grief by making gifts of food. When we have experienced losses in our family, friends and neighbors show up with food for our household.

I’ve been thinking about food and occasions of grief the past couple of days because we were attending the funeral of a colleague and friend. Now that my hair is white, I am often considered an elder in a community gathering. In the traditions of the community where we were visiting, elders are served first and while some members of the community are asked to go through a serving line, our plates were brought to us, heaped with food.

The evening service began at 7 pm and lasted about an hour and a half. It was getting close to 9 pm when we went to the fellowship hall for what we thought might be a snack and beverages. The tray that was set before me contained a large portion of ham, another large portion of turkey, several salads, both fruit and vegetables, baked beans, and fry bread. Just to make sure we wouldn’t go hungry, there was also a large bowl of hearty beef and vegetable stew and a sandwich in a bag to take home with us. A gift of food is not to be taken lightly and refusing such a gift might hurt feelings. I did my best, but was unable to eat all of the food that was set before me. Fortunately, I was able to escape the cakes, cookies and pies that filled the dessert table.

As I lay on my bed that night, I was well aware that I had just consumed a meal that was considerably larger than the Thanksgiving feast I had attended earlier in the week, where I was able to select my own portion size from the abundant offerings. I was also aware that it had been a mistake to eat three normal meals before attending the memorial service.

Yesterday’s funeral was followed by another feast. We were served another heaping tray with roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, salads and lots of other goodies. The stew was offered once again, though I managed to avoid being served soup. There were sheet cakes and lots of desserts, which also could be avoided. This time, however, I was slightly better prepared having skipped breakfast and heading home where i could eat a modest supper before retiring.

It seems as if I consumed a week’s worth of calories in two meals on two days.

I attend such funerals infrequently enough that I could develop some kind of an eating and training regimen to keep from over eating if I work at it, but it made me wonder. The man whose funeral we were attending had a ministry that was focused on the crises that occur in people’s lives. He frequently officiated at multiple funerals in the same week. He lived in the midst of that community where extravagant feasts are a regular part of funeral traditions. Yet he was never overweight. He maintained a healthy and lean body throughout his career.

I have commented to family and friends that ours is a “porcine profession.” I have struggled with my weight and spent many years of my life carrying extra pounds and have struggled to maintain a healthy diet. When I attend meetings of ministers, however, I am aware that most of my colleagues are considerably broader than I. A group of ministers traveling tourist on the airlines could cause a lot of discomfort for other passengers. The chairs in the chancel of our church are very large, and I guess for good purpose. A group photo of me with my colleagues requires either a very large room or a wide angle lens for the camera. You get the picture.

We clergy aren’t know for developing healthy eating habits or for taking care of our diet and exercise to maximize our energy and effectiveness.

It is likely that the counsel I offer to grieving families could best be applied to myself. Rather than reminding people to eat, perhaps I should be more careful reminding myself to make wise choices.

Historic religious practices sought to balance feasting with fasting. Times of celebration were to be set off with periods of careful abstention from eating. Advent is a season of fasting. Food isn’t the focus of the season, and the role of fasting has been downplayed in the traditional church, but we are clearly invited to focus our attention in other places than simply consuming calories.

I don’t find an over emphasis on self care to be the focus of my calling. I am called to serve others and to give my attention to the needs and circumstances of others. Paying too much attention to myself makes me uncomfortable and leaves me wondering if I have used my time and energy wisely. On the other hand, good health can boost endurance and increase the capacity to work and to serve others. A modest amount of self care is in the best interests of the overall ministry. Paying attention to my food consumption is an exercise in wise stewardship. With only one life to live, I am called to make wise decisions about how that life is lived.

I won’t be avoiding funerals. Nor will I avoid funeral dinners. But I do need to pay careful attention to my overall health and eating patterns. After all I don’t want to become one of those people who makes others cringe when they see me coming down the aisle in an airliner.

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