Regular readers, please note: I am on vacation, celebrating Christmas with my family. Over the next few days, the blog will be written daily, but published on an irregular basis. If you are used to reading it in the morning, never fear if it doesn’t appear. I’m alive and well and having a wonderful time - so wonderful that the blog takes a different place in my priorities. I’ll just be publishing at a different times of the day.

The seventh day of Christmas in the traditional Roman Calendar is a day set aside to give thanks for Pope Sylvester I. Sylvester I was pope of the church long before the Protestant Reformation, indeed before the Great Schism, and thus was pope of all of Christianity, including what would later become the Eastern and Protestant parts of the church. However, his memory is largely unheralded among Protestants. Here is the piece of church history that surrounds Sylvester I. He was Pope from 314 until his death in 335. That was a period of monumental change in the church.

The Council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicene Creed was held in 325. It might never have occurred had it not been for Pope Sylvester. Sylvester was a friend of Emperor Constantine and Constantine’s conversation to the Christian faith marked the transition for Christianity from being a small, illegal sect to becoming a mainstream religion. Prior to that time the church was largely a home-based religion, with meetings often held in secret for fear of government persecution. Christians continued to meet in synagogues, but there was always a tension between traditional Jews and Christians, especially in areas of the Roman empire where the majority of Christians came from the Gentile community.

Constantine’s conversion, however, made Christianity legal in the Empire and beyond that, it made it popular among Roman elites and soon Christianity was not only a mainstream religion, but it became closely affiliated with the Roman government. There are benefits to being a mainstream religion: more members, more financial support, and a more permanent place in history. There are also costs: less autonomy for the church, greater outside influences on the faith and practices, and even outside control of the faith itself.

Nowhere was this more clear than in the First Council of Nicaea. Constantine, thinking in the manner of an Emperor, wanted there to be a standard Christian belief to which all Christians ascribed. He demanded that a statement of faith be drawn up that would be voted upon by all of the bishops of the church and would be the norm for all belief and practice. The problem, of course, is that agreement was never at the core of the Christian faith. As one can easily tell by reading about the differences and discussions of the disciple and reading the letters of Paul, the early church was a place of different and divergent beliefs and practices, and sometimes even disagreements and infighting.

Although Constantine got what he demanded (he was used to getting what he demanded) the unanimous agreement of the bishops required defrocking the minority who refused to sign on to the creed. In fact, even with the defrocking of the dissidents, the creed continued to be an item of disagreement and controversy, and it was amended by the First Council of Constantinople in 381 into the Greek form of the creed that is known and used to this day. The Apostles’ Creed arose shortly thereafter, around 390 and has been seen by many church historians as a corrective to some of the language of the Nicene Creed. The Apostles Creed gained acceptance in the mainstream church by claiming to have originated form the 1st 12 apostles, with each of its 12 articles of faith coming from a different apostle. This clearly is an after-the-fact fabrication intended to gain the statement acceptance in the mainstream church, as the Creed clearly did not exist prior to Nicaea.

Virtually from the beginning of the Roman Church in the time of Pope Sylvester 1 and Constantine, creeds were abused and made into tests of faith. People were required to declare and sometimes even sign that they believed every point of a creed in order to be considered to be Christian, and in some cases, to escape persecution and even death for disbelief. In a very short order the church went from being an institution that was persecuted to a persecutor of those who didn’t fall in with the hierarchy of the Roman religious institution. Instead of being bold declarations of faith, creeds became weapons in a battle to enforce conformity.

In our corner of the church since the Protestant Reformation, we have asserted that statements of faith should always be used as testimonies and never as tests of faith. We affirm that the faith is beyond any set of words and indeed beyond the capacity of any individual to understand. Christianity is, for us, not a matter of a personal possession, but rather a participation in a community with a long and varied history and tradition, a global and multicultural presence and a future that stretches beyond our capacity to imagine. Christianity cannot be defined or contained in a single set of words. It is what the community believes together. It is a relationship with God, who comes to us in human form in the person of Jesus Christ.

So today, on the seventh day of Christmas, I look back at our history with mixed feelings. I do not venerate a particular person, or even know if it is appropriate to celebrate the Romanization of Christianity. That chapter of our history, however, is a part of our identity. While we can speculate on the pre-Roman church as a place of simpler (and perhaps purer) faith, such a moment has passed. We live in the time after Christianity became mainstream. We live with contemporary tensions between secular government and the lives of faithful Christians. And we see the creeds as tools for teaching the history of our faith, not as tests that might somehow determine who is and who is not a person of faith.

And, in the midst of this great line of history-making in the span of my life, there has arisen a new statement of faith. The Statement of Faith of the United Church of Christ, which grew out of the union of the Congregational-Christian and Evangelical-Reformed churches may well be, as a friend has described it, the most significant and longest lasting words to have been written in the 20th Century. It will take centuries for that to be known. What I do know is that it is an eloquent way to express our faith and when a community reads it together, it gives voice to what we share in common.

And on this day, our shared history is a journey worth studying and celebrating. The contemporary church, which has grown out of that history, is a blessing and a gift.

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The sixth day of Christmas is a day set aside to meditate on the Holy Family. It is a day for prayer for all families. The traditions of our people have taught us that families come in many different shapes and sizes and configurations. We really don’t know very much about Jesus’ family. The Epistles never mention Joseph, father of Jesus, nor does the Gospel of Mark. Most of what we know about Joseph comes from Matthew, with a few details added by Luke. Matthew gives us his genealogy and reports an encounter between Joseph and an angel in which Joseph seeks to do the right thing upon hearing that Mary is expecting a child. His initial instincts were to leave the mother, as that was customarily the choice made in such circumstances, but the angel’s words persuade him to remain with her. After Jesus birth, Joseph protects his family by fleeing to Egypt. Again we get this part of the story only from Matthew’s Gospel.

Other than that, we know very little of Joseph. In Christian tradition, he has become the patron saint of those who work with their hands, especially woodworkers. The Bible mentions that Joseph is a carpenter and that tradition has been honored throughout the history of the church.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been surrounded with story and veneration. Once again, there is very little primary material about her in the Bible. Most of the stories of Mary come from the Gospel reports of her. There are stories of her throughout Jesus’ life and ministry and she is witness to his death on the cross, and, most agree, to his resurrection.

Jesus also had brothers and sisters, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Both have essentially the same information. They name his brothers and mention the sisters without giving names: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”

Jesus, like many other leaders of faith, however, reaches beyond his family of origin. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all report that Jesus asked, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Jesus goes on to refer to those who listen to his teaching as his mother and brothers, indicating that he has strong familial ties to his circle of believers and followers.

But today is a day for more than prayers for the family of Jesus. It is a day of prayers for families everywhere. There probably is not such thing as a typical family. Each is unique. My family of origin contains the story of my mother initially being frustrated with the fact that she did not become pregnant for some time after their marriage. My parents decided to become foster parents and accepted two little girls into their home. I don’t think they expected to bond so quickly. As can be the case, it was love at first sight and neither of my parents could imagine life without the girls. They applied to become adoptive parents and the adoption was completed. They had a family: dad and mom and two daughters. Then pregnancies did occur. Three more children, another daughter and two sons joined the family. I was the middle of those children. Later two more boys were adopted. 7 kids, three born, four adopted; three girls, three boys. I grew up thinking that our family was normal. And when Susan and I formed our family, though it was smaller, we have a son who was born to us and a daughter who came to us by adoption. Clearly love trumps biology in my personal experience. Adopted family members are real family members in every sense of the word.

In our church there are families that have experienced divorce and reconfiguration in many ways. One of the larger families in our church is blended with children whose birth mother, though divorced, is still involved and cares for the children part time. Their siblings’ birth father is no longer living. Some of the children in the same family experience mother and step father as primary parents. Other children have mother, father and stepmother. They have found a way to pull off a family with love and grace. And the abundance of grandparents is an added blessing to this family group.

Today our hearts and prayers go out to another family in our congregation who are grieving the death of a child who died in utero. They had all of the excitement and expectation of a new life and were anticipating the birth, and the result turned out differently. Their spiritual maturity and strength have been evident in the midst of the grief and loss and I know they will continue to be a strong family for the other children, but there will always be a sense of what might have been that will dwell with them for all of their lives.

The more I think about it, the more I understand that there is no one model for family. We have families that are just mother and child or children. We have fathers with children where the mother is not in the picture. We have families that are couples who have never had children. We have families that have been reconfigured with multiple divorces and remarriages. We have grandparents who raise the children of their children.

And, like Jesus, there are times when we can see our community as an extended family. Events in our church family affect us as deeply as if they had occurred in our own household.

Celebrating families is a wonderful way to spend one of the days of Christmas. And family celebrations are too wonderful to be continued in a single day.

Today we will complete our trip to our daughter and son-in-law’s home where we will be joined tomorrow by our son and his family. Our whole gang will be together for a few joyous days. The excitement I feel as I write is deep.

For some Christmas may have ended after December 25. For us, the joy is just too much for a single day.

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In Roman Catholic and Anglican circles, the fifth day of Christmas is a day to remember Thomas Becket. Known as St. Thomas of Canterbury, Becket was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170. He was murdered in the cathedral by four nights, who it seems thought they were acting on the direct order of King Henry II. The place of Becket’s death in Canterbury Cathedral is marked by a sculpture with a representation of four swords.

In our tradition, we remember Becket a bit differently. It isn’t that we differ with the basic biography of the man. It is that we see him a player in an institutional church that was becoming so corrupted that it was in serious need of reform. Although Becket lived hundreds of years before the Anglican Communion separated from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s, which itself predates the vestments controversy in England in the 1560’s which gave rise to Puritanism and the beginnings of our particular denomination as a separate group within the church, Becket’s story is seen as an example of the corruption and political in fighting that made radical reformation necessary.

To understand our side of the story, one has to go back and remember the mindset of the day. In the England of the mid 1100s, there was little distinction between secular government and the rule of the Roman Church. Although the church acknowledged the pope in Rome as its titular head, in England, the church was firmly ensconced as a governmental institution. The King wielded a heavy hand in the officials of the church and the funding of the government and the funding of the church were so intertwined that average citizens had no sense of the difference between a tax and a tithe. Both the church and government were institutions of incredible wealth and power in the midst of a society in which the average citizen was struggling just to get enough food to eat. Any sense of democracy - of power being vested in the people - had not yet arisen.

Church leaders were “elected,” but only a few elites within the church were allowed to vote. There was a hierarchy of priests, bishops, archbishops and cardinals each of whom amassed considerable wealth and power as the result of his position.

Thomas Becket’s father was a lord who was a landowner. His mother came from a merchant family. Becket grew up with the luxuries of the rich and enjoyed hunting and hawking as a child. He studied in church schools and traveled to Paris and Rome as a young man. He never entered any advanced studies in theology or the law. He seemed destined to inherit his father’s lordship and perhaps might have aspired to become a petty knight, but his father experienced significant financial losses in Thomas’ early adulthood. Thus the young man was forced to take a job as a clerk - a position in which he might have remained all of his life. But Becket was a good clerk and his employer recommended him to the King (Henry II) for the post of Lord Chancellor, and Beckett assumed that position in 1155.

As Chancellor, Beckett was charged with enforcing revenue rules. He essentially was a tax collector who visited landowners, including churches and bishoprics to collect revenue to support the monarchy. In the tradition of the day, children of royals were fostered into the families of royal appointees, and Becket was charged with the care of young Henry (who later became Henry III). As such he had close ties to the king.

After 7 years as the king’s revenue agent, Becket was nominated by Henry II to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. The previous archbishop had died and Henry wanted a person in this powerful position who would be under his control. Church leaders were elected by councils of noblemen and bishops in those days. It is clear than Henry promoted Beckets candidacy because he wanted someone in the position who would put the royal government first and the church second.

Keep in mind that Beckett had no theological education and had not been particularly involved in the church to that point in his life. He had never served as a priest or a bishop. Nonetheless, he got the position and was ordained as a priest on June 2, 1162 and the very next day consecrated by archbishop of Canterbury.

As sometimes is the case with royal plans, Henry’s plan to have complete control of the church simply didn’t work out. The hierarchy of the church was more loyal to Rome than to the king. Becket seemed to have undergone a deep personal conversion at the time of his ordination and consecration and began to live as an ascetic. He devoted himself as fully to his religious duties as he had to the job of being the kings revenue agent. As conflict between the church and the king escalated, Becket clearly was taking the side of the church. Henry and church leaders fought over whether or not secular courts would have any jurisdiction over clergymen. They disagreed over the authority of the king in the councils of religious leaders. The fight became personal when it came to Beckett. The former friends had become enemies. Henry proposed new legal documents to limit the powers of the church. Becket refused to sign. Henry issued edicts. Becket refused to comply. At one point Becket threatened to excommunicate Henry. The king’s response has been lost to history - or at least there are several different versions . One version is “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Whatever he said, the result was the murder of Becket in the cathedral by the kings knights ended that particular chapter of the story.

Catholics and Anglicans recognize today as the day of Becket’s martyrdom. In our part of the church, we remember the whole story as an illustration of how corrupt both the church and the government had become and a sign that great reforms would be required for the church to focus more on its spiritual calling than on the order of secular society. Fights over money and wealth, taxes and land ownership with no awareness of the plight of common people seem to be very distant from the mission and calling of Jesus Christ.

However you interpret the story of Becket, the fifth day of Christmas is a good day to be reminded of the human tendency to seek power and wealth and the corruption that comes from such pursuits. It is a good day to invest in the continuing reformation of the church.

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On a couple of occasions, I have been with parents on the occasion of the death of a child. Perhaps there is a miscarriage, or a baby that is born but unable to sustain life for more than a short amount of time. I have also been the one to inform parents of a sudden and traumatic loss of a child by automobile accident, suicide, or some other means. I have journeyed with families through a much slower trip of cancer or another major illness. During my intern year, I spent time with a family, including officiating at a funeral, for a 15-year old who died of a form of chemical poisoning that was the result of an after school job. These are times of deep pain and grief for all who are involved. There is something about the death of a child that seems to throw the general order of life off.

So is is no mystery that the two occasions when our people were the victims of attempts at destroying the people through the massacre of infants stand out and receive special emphasis in the Bible. The infant Moses narrowly escapes Pharaoh’s attempt to control the population of the Hebrew people by killing male children. There is a kind of parallel story with the Exodus plague of the death of the firstborns later in that story, when Egypt is the victim of the terror. And Matthew reports that Jesus narrowly escapes Herod’s attempt at dealing with his fear of the rise of a Messiah from the midst of the Jews by killing firstborn sons.

These stories don’t have a primary function of providing solace for parents who experience the death of their children. Rather, they tell of some of the larger dynamics of our history, including these great losses and their attendant suffering as evidence that we can survive even the most gross and cruel attempts at wiping us out.

But there is some small comfort in the simple fact of understanding that ours is not the first generation of people to have experienced the death of innocent children. We are not alone in our grief and sorrow and sadness. And when we pray, we pray to God who has seen this pain before.

The fourth day of Christmas is traditionally the day to remember the innocents as reported in Matthew’s Gospel.

“Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they were no more.”

It might seem like a strange thing to pause in the midst of the celebration of the birth of Jesus to acknowledge a dark and tragic event in the story of our people in which innocent children were slain.

It is, however, extremely important that we do not forget the death of innocents. Whether the story be that of Herod, the death of Jewish children during the Holocaust, the death of children in the Laotian killing fields, the death of children in the conflict in Sudan or any one of the hundreds of of the conflicts that claim the lives of innocents, we who survive are charged with the critical task of remembering.

To forget is to behave as if they never existed.

To forget is to believe that they did not matter.

So we have chosen to remember. Every year we set aside a day to remember not only the innocents who were killed by Herod in his irrational rage, we remember the innocents who have been killed in our world today.

On the one hand, there is good news to celebrate. The last quarter of a century has been a time of significant decrease in infant mortality. The dramatic decline in preventable child deaths since 1990 achieved nearly a halving (49%) of those deaths. The world saved almost 100 million children - among them, 24 million newborns, who would have died had mortality rates remained at 1990 levels.

Still, far too many preventable deaths occur. And our country is proving to be a dangerous place for infants and children. Homicide accounts for one in five injury-related deaths among infants in the United States. And the infant homicide rate increased from 4.3 per 100,000 in 1970 to 9.2 in 2000. It has declined a bit in the past 15 years, but the horror of the death of a single innocent is far too much.

Worldwide 1.2 million babies died in the birth process. Nearly a million babies do not survive their first day of life each year. The leading cause of newborn death is inadequate or nonexistent medical attention for the delivery of the baby. Nearly 3 million babies die within the first month of their lives. Again the reason is lack of proper medical care. The number of deaths of newborns is four times higher in Africa than it is in Europe.

Newborn deaths are not inevitable. Most are easily avoided if the simplest of medical care is made available.

So as we rejoice in the dramatic gift of the Christ child and the incredible joy of God coming to us in the person of an infant, we also set aside one of the days of Christmas to mourn the deaths of the innocent and to renew our commitment to doing what we are able to end preventable child deaths.

Each year Save the Children issues a report on ending newborn deaths. In addition to reporting the statistics, the report contains specific proposals for actions that can be taken by governmental and non governmental agencies to save lives.Hopefully the world will continue to prevent infant deaths.

As long as one mother weeps over the death of her child, however, we will continue to share her sorrow and grief.

On the fourth day of Christmas, we weep with those who weep.

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Yesterday, when I wrote about the Feast of St. Stephen, I failed to note that the days of Christmas have different meanings in different traditions. Some of the holidays of the Christian year, most notably Easter, don’t line up in the same way on the calendar of the Eastern Orthodox church as they do in the Western tradition. Christmas, however, does. We all celebrate the first day of Christmas on December 25. After that day, however, there are many different traditions. The Eastern church celebrates today - the third day of Christmas - as St. Steven’s Day. In the Western tradition, the third day of Christmas is a day devoted to John.

Each of the four Gospels has a different flavor. Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus, tracing his lineage back to Abraham. The gospel then goes on with a narrative about how Joseph responded to the news of Mary’s pregnancy. In the second chapter, we get the visit from the wise men and the escape to Egypt.

Mark doesn’t bother to tell a birth narrative. His telling of the story of Jesus begins with the proclamation of John the Baptist, followed by the baptism and temptation of Jesus.

Luke is where we get most of the Christmas stories that we tell in this season. After a brief dedication, he has the foretelling of the birth of John the Baptist and then that of Jesus. Mary visits Elizabeth and sings her incredibly beautiful song of praise and justice. John is born and Zechariah, finally regaining his speech, gets a prophetic song. In the second chapter, Jesus is born, the angels visit the shepherds and the shepherds visit the child, Jesus is named and presented in the temple, Simeon and Ana recognize the child as messiah, and the family returns to Nazareth. At the end of the chapter, Jesus is 12 years old and the family returns to the temple.

John takes a different approach, beginning with a powerful prologue that reads like well thought-out poetry and gives a complex theological description of the coming of Jesus.

In the Western tradition, especially in Roman Catholic congregations that observe the octave (eight masses on eight days from Christmas to New Years), the third day of Christmas is a day for the study of the Word and the reading of the prologue to the Gospel of John. That tradition has been expanded in other Western congregations to include not only the Gospel of John but the other stories about John the Baptist that appear in other parts of the Bible.

It is good to read Luke to learn of John’s parents and the drama of his birth, but it is the Gospel of John that gives a bit of a window on John’s role in the story of Jesus and his way of thinking and speaking.

Some years ago, I memorized the prologue to the Gospel of John (John 1:1-18. It makes a direct reference to John and his role:

“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.”

After the prologue, the gospel reports that John was questioned about his identity by priests and Levites from Jerusalem about his identity. He answers with a direct quote from the prophet Isaiah: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”

It is also from the first chapter of the Gospel of John that we first hear of Jesus as the Lamb of God. When Jesus comes to John in the wilderness, John sees him coming and declares, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”

That declaration is repeated in many different ways in the liturgies of the church and is often cited in the celebration of Communion.

In our church this year, one of strong images of the season came at the beginning of our Christmas Eve service, when we recalled Mary’s visit to Elizabeth and her song. Two women, both expecting the birth of children, portrayed the parts, with Mary singing her song while Elizabeth played the flute. It was, of course, just a pageant - a play to remind us of the story. But for me it was a powerful moment as we were invited to reflect on the courage and vision of the two women and of the vulnerability of the babies that they bore. God comes to us in human form, small and fragile and in need of constant care. God enlists human partners to bear this great gift to the world. Mary’s role as bearer of God is such an important one in the narrative. Perhaps that is a role that we can assume to one another - to bear the gift of God to others. Kendra Creasy Dean and Ron Foster used that image in their book about youth ministry, “The God Bearing Life: The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry.”

So today, as we continue our celebration of Christmas, is a good day to spend some time reading and reflecting on the words of the Bible. The first chapter of the Gospel of John would make a good read, though the opening chapters of any of the Gospels are filled with powerful images and ways of thinking about God’s great love for the world.

In his Christmas message to the faithful, Pope Francis reminded us to remember those who are suffering at this time of the year: “Truly, there are so many tears around the world this Christmas.” In an artful way, he reminded listeners that all infants cry. The tears of the infant Jesus are a reminder of the tears of those who suffer under war and disaster around the world. As the days pass and we mature into the season, it is appropriate that we turn our attention to the needs of others.

More on that topic tomorrow.

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Regular students fo the bible discover all sorts of twists and turns in the stories of our people. In the sixth and seventh chapters of the Acts of the Apostles the story of Stephen is one of those with all kinds of interesting nuances. The story begins with a bit of conflict. The early church had two factions: Hebrews and Hellenists. The Hebrews came from Jewish origins and spoke Hebrew. The Hellenists spoke Greek and traced their roots to those who had come to the area as part of occupying forces and armies. Even though many generations earlier the Hebrews had come into the region as settlers, they considered themselves to be the indigenous people of the region and the Hellenists to be settlers who had come into their land and taken it from them. Both groups contributed members to the early Christian movement.

One of the arguments that developed was among the distribution of welfare funds. In those days, support of widows came from special offerings taken by the synagogues, called “alms.” Alms were cash donations that were in turn invested in food that was distributed to widows. Some of the Hellenists felt that their widows were getting the short end of the distribution. The twelve apostles who were leading the Christian church in Jerusalem convened a meeting to discuss the situation. You can tell from the few brief sentences describing the situation that the arguments over the distribution of alms were seen by them as a distraction. Their solution was to have the people select seven additional leaders to take care of the distribution so that the 12 could devote themselves to praying and teaching. We have similar divisions of labor among clergy in contemporary churches as well.

Steven was one of the seven selected. We assume that he came from the Hellenistic side of the community because he has a Greek name instead of one with a Hebrew origin. He was apparently very good at his job. The bible says he did great signs and wonders.

Although he was selected to do they work of administering alms, Steven is most remembered for his preaching. The synagogue leaders got upset with what he was saying and charged him with blasphemy. Their charges were that his preaching about Jesus was not consistent with respectful teaching about Moses and the law. Most of the 7th chapter of the book of Acts contains Stephen’s testimony at his trial, often called his sermon. He makes a quick survey of the history of Israel and gives his interpretation of how this history and how again and again religious leaders fail to heed the words of prophets.

His sermon earned him a conviction and he was killed by stoning, thus becoming what Christians believe is the first martyr for the faith.

Called to free up the 12 for their preaching, he gives a sermon that gets him stoned.

Today is the traditional day set aside for remembering Stephen. The day after Christmas is known as “The Feast of Stephen.” Many know of it only because of the Christmas Carol: “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the Feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even.” The carol goes on to tell the story of a king who braves the harsh winter weather to bring gifts to the poor. The storm is so severe that his page nearly becomes lost in the blizzard, but he is able to follow his king’s footsteps to safety. Wenceslas is also considered to be a saint and a martyr in some parts of the church. Pope Pius II is said to have walked ten miles barefoot in the ice and snow as a demonstration of his personal piety.

Whatever the actual history, the church has a longstanding tradition of recognizing the second day of Christmas, December 26, as a day of giving to the poor. In parts of the United Kingdom a tradition of delivering boxes of food and other presents to those in need evolved into a recognized holiday, known as boxing day. Boxing day is the first workday following Christmas, so does not always land on December 26. When Christmas is on a Saturday, for example, Boxing Day is observed on Monday rather than Sunday. The Boxing Day tradition evolved into a time for employers to give gifts to their employees in recognition of their year’s work. That tradition evolved into the tradition of giving Christmas bonuses to employees.

Some cynics attribute the giving of St. Stephens Day or Boxing Day gifts to the excesses of the wealthy on Christmas Day. Essentially they claim that the wealthy so over indulge in their Christmas celebrations that they are burdened with leftovers, which in turn are distributed to those who are less fortunate - a sort of “thrift store” approach that includes not only the donation of clothes and furniture but food as well.

It is clear that traditions of giving are associated with the observance of Christmas throughout the history of the Christian church. And not all of the gifts are given on Christmas Day. In many parts of the world, the giving of gifts is reserved for Epiphany Day - January 6 - which is the day of the observance of the arrival of the magi - wise men from the east reported in the Gospel of Matthew.

In modern times, however, The Feast of Stephen, or Boxing Day, or whatever one calls it has gained an entirely different meaning. It has become a day for shopping to take advantage of post-holiday sales and go on an end of the year shopping binge. Merchants, with an eye on the end of the year bottom line, discount prices to move inventory and increase income. In Australia, Canada, South Africa and other former British colonies Boxing Day is comparable to the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday in the United States. In many of those places, Boxing Day has expanded to Boxing Week, a time when merchants encourage extra shopping between Christmas and New Years.

The apostles tried to make giving to support the poor into a specialized ministry and it turned into the ministry of proclamation. In our time we take a season of giving and turn it into a season of getting.

We remain confused.

Fortunately Christmas is a season. We’ve still got ten of our 12 days of Christmas to remind ourselves of the real meaning of the season.

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A very merry Christmas to you, dear blog reader. I am grateful that you have taken the time to read a few of my words. I am grateful for the kind comments that I receive. And today I have much to celebrate: health, family, a wonderful job and so much more.

But I know that there are those for whom the celebration of Christmas this year is a strain and others for whom holidays are always difficult. It has become common in many congregations to dedicate one of the later days of Advent to a “Blue Christmas” observance. Sometimes the solstice is chosen as the occasion. In the Northern Hemisphere it is the longest night of the year and it can be a very appropriate time for a very meaningful service of longing for light, for hope, for peace, for joy and for love. There are many who find this a season of grief and loneliness.

In my Christmas prayers today are two families whose journey of grief over the loss of a son to suicide is painfully fresh. I was privileged to be with both families and to hear parts of their stories. Despite the pain of loss, each family carried a sense of gratitude for the life that was given to them, even though the life was all too short and its ending defies logic. The questions are many. The answers are few. The grief is overwhelming. It is as if, for those families, their advent wreath has no candle of joy this year. For them there is no joy this Christmas. But make no mistake about it. In both families the candle of love burns strongly. And, as the Bible clearly teaches, God is love. Even in homes darkened by the pall of grief, the Christ child is born. God comes. As the Gospel of John declares, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”

In my head are the plaintive strains of the carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” As a person who has moved around some in this life, I am not quick to attach faithfulness to any single place. Bethlehem is indeed a holy city, but there are many holy places. Yet the song paints an image for all who sing it: “Yet in thy dark streets shineth, an everlasting light. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

Christmas 2014 finds our world filled with so many dark streets in need of light.

Our research is not yet completed, but it appears that in all of the 136 years of ministry of our congregation, 2014 has emerged as the year with the most funerals. It was easy to look around the full church and the congregation last night and rejoice in the new faces, but also to remember the faces whose attendance last year turned out to be their last Christmas with us. I couldn’t avoid thinking as I sang the carols and looked out into the congregation that for some who were worshiping with us this Christmas will be the last.

Yesterday I spent a little time in the dentist’s chair. At one point the hygienist sprayed a very small amount of water that splashed on my forehead. She apologized profusely. I laughed. No harm had been done. I assured her that I was waterproof and that I seem to take even full immersion without ill effect. My laughter freed her up to laugh and to comment that it was a bit distracting to be working on a white-bearded man on Christmas Eve. I assured her that I am not St. Nicholas, but said nonetheless, it is a good thing that we can take a little water.

It is a good thing that we are waterproof.

There are tears to mix with the joy this holiday.

I spent a few minutes with an elder this week who was all alone on Christmas Eve. There were plans to go to his son’s home for Christmas dinner today. As we visited he reminisced on how Christmas Eve was always such a family occasion. He and his wife were active in the church and always had major parts in the Christmas Eve service, singing in the choir, helping with costumes and other functions. Last night he had to arrange for a ride to church despite the fact that he has a daughter and a son and grandchildren who are in town. With a sigh he said, “It’s different now.”

It is different, now. One of the many text messages we received in the past week noted, “We can’t come to church, we are celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve.” Just one generation older in that family, celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve would have meant coming to church. Of course, I’m probably very old fashioned. Celebrating Christmas is mostly about going to church for me. I find church to be a great place to celebrate Christmas. One of the Christmas traditions I most look forward to is the celebration of communion and the tolling of the Christmas bell at midnight.

Each Christmas I recite the prologue to the Gospel of John, that declares, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not over come it!”

It also says, “He was in the world and the world came to being through him, but the world did not recognize him. He came to his own people, but they did not receive him.”

That, my friends, is our world. It isn’t all joy and celebration and bright lights and presents. There are still a few dark corners - a few places where folks just don’t get it.

So we will tell the story again. And again. And again. Sometimes we tell it to others so that they can recognize in its simple beauty, the great love that God has for all people. Sometimes we tell it so that we can hear it agan and be reminded that we, too, are loved.

Merry Christmas, friends. Merry Christmas!

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The name Eve means life. In Hebrew it is not only the name of the woman in the second Genesis story of Creation. In its verb form it means “to breathe.” In that story, Adam (whose name means “earth”) received the Eve (breath of life) from God. So Adam is literally earth endowed with the breath of life. There is a similar language play in English if we think of “human” and “humus” (dark, organic soil). Then, in that same story of creation, God causes Adam to sleep (literally knocks the breath out of him) and removes one side of him (the term has often been translated “rib”) and forms Eve.

I know a little bit about the word because it is the middle name of our daughter. Spelling is a bit of a challenge when translating a name from one language to another. We had bit of a conversation about the spelling of her first name, Rachel, which is also from the Hebrew. There are quite a few different spellings of Rachel in English. We decided that the most common spelling was best. So we went with the most common spelling of her middle name in English as well: “Eve.” That was a bit of a departure from the tradition, on my side of the family, of using the Latin spelling “Eva.” That is the name used in the Latin bible and the same spelling is fairly common in northern Europe. In our family, the name has also been pronounced “eva” instead of the more common “eev.” But we chose the common spelling and pronunciation for our daughter’s name, bending the tradition slightly. I know it is the same name with the same meaning even though it is slightly different from that of my maternal grandmother.

So, in our family, we make a connection between life and the time of day when the sunset occurs. The word evening does not come from Hebrew. It is, rather, from the Old English and means “the time around sunset.” Sometime in the mid-15th Century the word arose as a replacement from the older “cwildtid.”

The term “eve” in common English has been shortened from “evening” and has come to mean “the night before” as in Christmas Eve or New Years Eve.

Which brings us to another tradition and story from my family. I grew up with a brother who was born on December 24. In my family, it was important to give each child a special day of celebration on their birthday, so we did not mix Christmas traditions with the celebration of my brother’s birthday. In our home, the day of December 24 was given to the birthday celebration. We didn’t celebrate Christmas until the next day. But in a family with seven children, hyped by the anticipation of Christmas and the extra sugar of a birthday celebration, a bit of foreshadowing was allowed. So, after dinner and after dark on Christmas Eve, we would gather around the piano. My father would read the Christmas Story from Luke’s Gospel. Later, as we learned to read, we kids would sometimes read part of the story and we added the bit about the wise men from Matthew. Then we’d all sit in the living room and mother would hand out one gift from the pile under the tree for us to open. After that, we’d have a bit of time to play with our gift and it was time to hang the stockings and off to bed. I have no conscious memory of visions of sugarplums dancing, however.

As a result of the combination of these bits from my life, I have made a deep association between the two meanings of the word “Eve.” For me Eve means life. And for me eve means anticipation. And that combination of meanings is very powerful for me.

Our life is anticipation.

To be fully alive is to live in expectation.

When I was a child, I guess that I expected I would one day be married, but I didn’t really know what that would mean. When we were newly-wed, I expected that we would one day have children, but I didn’t know what that would be like. When we had young children at home, I expected that one day we would become grandparents, but I didn’t really know what that would mean. Each stage of my life has unfolded with much more than I anticipated. It is as if each calling I have received has been to an assignment that is better than the last one. My life has been a layering of meaning upon meaning.

Of course not every moment of my life has been sweetness. It has been painful to grieve the death of parents and siblings. I’ve had down days and gloomy times. Still, now that I’m old enough for an AARP card and my hair has turned white, I know there is much to anticipate. After all, at my next birthday, I become old enough for a “Golden Age Passport” good for discounted admission to National Parks and Federal recreational lands.

In a large sense, however, to be alive is to live in anticipation and expectation. It is one of the lessons of the season of Advent. There is something particularly delicious about expectations. When I think back on the Christmases of my childhood, there are few presents that stand out. I don’t know what I received on my 5th or 8th Christmas or many of the other ones. But I really remember the anticipation of Christmas - the excitement of the build-up - the hope of joy yet to come. And that anticipation is delicious and wonderful.

Today, Christmas Eve, 2014, is filled with a similar sense of anticipation for me. At 7 this evening, after dark, our congregation will gather for our big Christmas Eve service. There will be costumes and actors and anthems and bells and organ and candles. We’ll read the familiar story and sing the familiar carols. But my favorite service of the year comes after that one. At 11:30, on the very cusp of the change from one day to the next, we will gather for a more quiet service - a time of a return to the story and a bit of jazz and a simple celebration of Holy communion.

I get to live the whole day - up until the last half hour - in anticipation.

And there is yet more to come!

On the seventh day of Christmas (Dec. 31) our whole family will be together in the home of our daughter for our family celebrations. Kids and grandkids and the great joy of being together.

And, I’ve come to understand that even when that grand celebration is over, God has much more good yet to come.

Life (Eve) is anticipation (Eve).

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Recently I heard part of a TED talk by Pico Iyer. He referred to the new field of interruption science. Interruption science is just what it sounds like: the study of interruptions. According to Iyer, Interruption scientists have found that it takes an average of 25 minutes to recover from the interruption of a phone call. I suppose that could be right. When I am focused and working on something like the annual report or an edition of our newsletter, a phone call can get me off track for quite a while.

Here’s the “kicker”: The average person takes a phone call every 11 minutes during their working day. If it takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call and we take a call every 11 minutes, we’re losing ground at an alarming rate! For each eight-hour work day, the average person falls behind a little over 10 hours.

No wonder we never get caught up with out lives.

Looking at it from another perspective, one not explored in the TED talk, however, my real work is not the things I am doing when I am sitting at my desk. Sure a church has to be administered and it needs a balanced budget and regular communication. We need to produce the annual reports and the newsletter and printed bulletins for every worship service. They need to be thoughtful and well-designed and accessible for our people. We need a web site and a Facebook page and other kinds of social media. But the real reason to have a pastor is not to administer a religious institution. It is to have a person to respond to the deepest human needs. My real work is listening to the person on the other end of the phone and responding with compassion and care.

I’ve done some of my best work standing outside on a cold night comforting someone who has just experienced a loss. There are days when I accomplish far more responding to the interruption than following a carefully crafted work plan.

That said, I don’t take a phone call every 11 minutes. My cell phone records the calls coming in and out. On Saturday, I engaged in 9 phone calls on my cell phone. Yesterday, I didn’t make or receive any calls. I did speak on my home phone a couple of times during the day.

Although I’m no luddite, I am nowhere near as attached to my smartphone as are the youth in our youth group. Once again, we have been having conversations about how we can teach our youth appropriate use of their devices. We’ve had many conversations with them about sacred time. There are times when it is important to set aside the devices and focus one’s attention on God. Worship cannot occur if one doesn’t center one’s attention. Now we realize that we need to speak also about presentness with the group. A cell phone takes one out of the present situation. It connects you with someone who is not participating in the group. It diverts your attention.

I know that the buzzword is multi-tasking. Many people have accepted a common assumption that doing more than one thing at a time is somehow a sign of productivity despite research that shows the exact opposite. In fact doing one thing at a time is the way to be the most effective. In an extreme example, we have to be vigilant in teaching people not to attempt to send and receive text messages when driving. Distracted driving is no joke. We know how fatal that can be. Texting during class or youth group is just as distracting - the consequences aren’t quite as severe, but there are consequences of ignoring the present moment.

Placing limits on modern technology is a survival skill in today’s world. In Silicon Valley, where many of these devices were designed and where the majority of the people are employed in producing the next generation of electronic devices, it is becoming increasingly common for individuals to observe an “Internet Sabbath.” They simply turn off most of their devices for an extended period of time on a regular basis. I could remind them that this is a basic Biblical concept, known by our people for thousands of years, but that information probably won’t inspire them.

As an aside, the ten commandments uses the word “holy” in reference to only one of the commandments - the sabbath. Keeping the sabbath holy is a commandment.

Companies as varied as Google and General Mills have set aside meditation rooms not out of some dedication to theological principles, but out of the simple fact that they have discovered that employees who are physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually fit are more productive. Employees who take time to meditate regularly are more productive than those who do not. It is simply good business.

But these are lessons that have to be learned over and over again. We need to teach each generation the importance of stillness, the power of prayer and the importance of being present.

The incredible technological devices that we all carry present a special challenge to the generation of youth who have never known life without them. We realize how new and different these devices are. I lived more than two-thirds of my life without a cell phone. I made it all the way through college without access to a private phone. There was no telephone in my dorm room. Even our children didn’t have cell phones during their college years.

But the youth in our church youth group don’t remember life before computers. Most of them can’t remember before their parents had cell phones. They fully expected to have their own personal smart phone by their middle school years. They conduct their lives by social media. They sleep with their phones by their bedside and respond to messages in the middle of the night. Their world is different from ours.

It will demand a unique set of skills.

Fortunately, we have ancient truths to inform those skills. And it is our job to teach them.

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There is a peaceful calm about our house this morning. The pace of our Christmas preparations is about to seed up. Christmas Eve is a hectic day for us, with all of the preparations for the services. There are candles to be put out, lights to be checked, music to be rehearsed, liturgy to be reviewed, people to be recruited, instructions to be given. I think that I am better able to deal with all of the hubbub now than was the case years ago. My family got used to me being uptight on Christmas Eve and waited patiently for the services to be over and me to relax for the celebration of Christmas. These days, I don’t take myself so seriously. I’m a bit better at accepting mistakes and glitches.

After all, God has never demanded perfection of us - only faithfulness.

Still, I do notice that my anxiety levels rise when I am thinking of the big 7pm service on Christmas Eve. I do want things to be right. I do want them to go smoothly. I do want the timing of the star to be correct. I do want the baby to be comforted.

But that is a couple of days away and preparations are on track. Today is a bit slower pace. Everyone else is in the midst of their Christmas preparations and they don’t have time to stop and visit.

So, in place of the usual, this morning’s blog will be devoted to topics that have run across my mind, but will probably never make the blog. In most cases I don’t have more than a paragraph to say on the topic.

Why don’t all pajamas have pockets. I know. They’re for sleeping. What do you need to have in your pockets when you sleep. And, of course the answer is nothing. The problem is that I don’t just wear pajamas for sleeping. I’ve been known to put them on and sit and read a book for a while before crawling into bed. When I am on call, which is about a quarter of the time, I have to have my phone at hand all the time, day or night. There’s no place to put the phone if I have no pockets. How much extra cloth does it take to put a single pocket on a pair of pajamas. I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t destroy the economy if every pair had a pocket.

Why is it so hard for people in the computer industry to admit mistakes or to say that they don’t know. There is a short list of things that I can do to check the Internet connection at the church before calling the provider. They include rebooting routers and computers, checking our network and making sure that our equipment is working properly. I do this every time we have a problem before calling anyone. When I get on the phone with the technician, the first thing they assume is that the problem is caused by our equipment. Even if I know for certain that the problem is not with our equipment, they won’t believe me. And it isn’t just the cable company. I recently spent several weeks exchanging e-mails with the technical support of a software company showing them how their most recent “upgrade” failed to work in situations where the previous version had worked. They blamed the brand of computer I own. They blamed the size of my files. They blamed the way I had my data organized. They came up with a new thing I should try for every e-mail. After several weeks, I finally got an admission from them that there was a problem with the new version, that their engineers were aware of the problem, and that a fix would be included in a subsequent upgrade. At least I got them to admit that the problem was caused by their software and not me. Subsequently, two upgrades have been released without fixing the problem. Chances are they can’t figure out how to fix the problem.

When we hire a technician to work on the network at the church, the first hour (for which we are paying), the technician will repeat all of the things I’ve told him or her that I’ve already done. They don’t seem to believe that I have any competence with the machines. They don’t seem to trust that I might know something about how to administer the network.

The bottom line is that if a computer or a piece of software requires an engineer to use, it isn’t useful for us. We need equipment and software that can be used by normal people. The failure to produce such products is an engineering flaw, not a failure of the end user.

If the priceless and irreplaceable statue of David by Michelangelo is in danger of falling because of micro cracks in the legs and frequent earthquakes in the area, why don’t they gently lay it down in a safe location while they build a new plinth? The Italian government is set to spend the quarter of a million dollars required for the plinth, but it is going to take a year or so to complete it. Why risk the statue while the plinth is being made.

Actually, I doubt that the statue is in much danger. I just like using the word, “plinth.”

Why is it that with over 17,000 acres of the San Joaquin Valley in California devoted to the production of apricots the only dried apricots we are able to find are produced in Turkey? I’ve no problems with Turkey producing apricots, but why do the dried ones have to take such a big trip to make it to our markets? You’d think someone could produce a dried apricot a bit closer to where we live.

And none of these topics is earth shattering or very important. They are just the crazy thoughts that go through my mind. Writing them down is a way of getting rid of them so that I can focus my attention on more important thoughts.

After all Christmas Eve is the day after tomorrow! I’d better get to work.

Just one more question: Why is is that this blog sounds a bit like something Any Rooney might have written?

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A brief Latin lesson to begin your day: “vocatio" means “summons.” It is a direct order to do a specific task. In English, the word is vocation, and we generally do not include such a forceful definition. We often talk of vocation as a feeling. Vocation carries with it a sense that one is particularly well suited for a particular career or occupation. Often we use the word simply to identify the main occupation or employment of a person.

The term, however, still carries with it that deeper sense of a direct order, especially when applied to certain callings. In the ministry, we often use the term “call” when we speak of vocation. There are a dozen or more places where the Bible speaks of the concept. Romans 12 is often cited: “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.”

In our denomination, as is the case of many others, part of the process of ordination is being able to be articulate about one’s call. After the educational requirements for ministry are achieved, one has to present a formal paper that describes one’s experience of being called to the ministry. That paper is examined together with the candidate for ministry. In our tradition that examination takes place in the context of an ecclesiastical council. The wider fellowship of the church, in most cases an Association of churches, is convened for the purpose of examining the candidate in terms of fitness for ministry. The candidate presents her or his paper, questions are asked and answered and a formal vote is taken.

It has been decades, but I remember the process very well. My paper was titled, “A chosen chooser.” I spoke of vocation both in terms of being chosen - having received a compelling sense of direction as the result of prayer and consultation with spiritual advisors - and in terms of making choices - responding to the call with specific choices that put me on the path towards pastoral ministry.

In my mid twenties, I think I had a strong sense of my own free will and my capacity to direct my life in different directions. I might have gone into my father’s business. I had that option. I might have chosen law school. I might have chosen to be an academic. I might have chosen to become a counselor.

Looking back from nearly four decades later, I am not sure that any of those other options would have been a wise choice and at least some of them would have been choices that led to failure. Perhaps there was more of a “vocatio” - a direct order from God than I realized at the time.

The Gospel of Luke reports that when Mary learns that she is to be the mother of Jesus, the news is given as a direct statement: “Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.” Mary, who we have already met as one who “ponders” a lot, is given no choice. There is no negotiation here, no sense that it might be possible for Mary to refuse. Mary does ask, “How can this be?” The response is that “nothing will be impossible for God.” That is the conversation. There is no “perhaps I’ll consider this or that.”

Still, a few verses later, when Mary goes to greet her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country, Elizabeth makes her famous declaration, “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” There is almost a sense in Elizabeth’s words that it might have been possible for Mary to have refused to believe. There might even be a hint that others had refused before Mary.

I suppose it is a rather subtle argument about whether one is in control of the choices one makes or whether one is responding to having been chosen. I am sure that both dynamics are a part of the decisions that get made.

Sometimes it seems obvious what direction one should take in one’s life. Our daughter was drawn to and skilled with children from a very early age. There is no surprise in the fact that she is a preschool teacher. It seems as if it is exactly what she was called to be from a very early age. Our son, on the other hand, earned a degree in English and showed considerable skill as a writer. In college he thought that he might become a writer for films. The ned to earn a living found him in library school where he was especially interested in medical libraries and he works as a hospital administrator these days, directing multiple hospital libraries. He is no less suited for the work he does than is his sister, but the particular job that he does did not seem as clear when he was a child.

Most of today’s young adults will face multiple job shifts during their working years and many will go through a total change of career. The world of work is changing so quickly that there are jobs that will be critical a couple of decades from now that we cannot even imagine today. There are jobs that exist today that won’t exist in the future. Successful people will be those who are adaptable and who can change course and head in a new direction.

That, of course, is an other Biblical mandate. “Repent” means simply that. Stop going the direction you are headed and go in a new direction.

Both the call to a vocation and the call to repent come as direct orders in the Biblical narrative. Perhaps, as was Mary’s case, the key to vocational success lies in being willing to believe that one has been called.

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Sometimes I think that my brain works backwards from others. At least I often find my ideas to be different from those of the people who surround me. It isn’t that I disapprove of the conclusions others reach, though sometimes I do, it is that my process of thinking seems to be quite distinct from that of many others.

Christmas is one example of how I see things differently from others. Up and down our street are lots of houses that are covered with lights and decorations. The decorations in our neighborhood started to go up before Thanksgiving and some of the houses had their lights turned on by Thanksgiving weekend. Our house, by contrast, has no outside decorations. A simple tree with a few white lights sits in the living room window, so folks passing by can see it, but they rarely notice because, compared to the neighbors, our home seems dark. I’ve never gone in for outward displays.

We like to give gifts and we have gifts for children and grandchildren under our tree. Some are wrapped, but we may not get around to wrapping all of them until December 25. After all, Christmas is a 12-day holiday and we won’t be with our family until around the time the rest of the country is celebrating New Years. For the most part we avoid shopping and stores as much as possible during all of the holiday sales and shopping sprees - it just isn’t the way we like to celebrate.

I am a minister, and I enjoy the services of the church very much, but my favorite service of the year isn’t one of the ones when the church is full. Our 7 pm Christmas Eve service is one of the largest we have in terms of the number of people who participate. The parking lot will be crowded and the pews will be full. And there will be a lot of activity with all of the candles and the moving star and the actors and pageantry.

At 11:30 there will be about one tenth of the number of people. We will gather quietly, sing a few carols, tell the story from Luke’s gospel, light candles, pray, share communion and toll the bell at midnight. I absolutely love that service. My attention is not on the size of the crowd or the managing of the cast of characters or the timing of the music. My mind is focused on the incredible gift of incarnation.

I am probably a poor evangelist. But it seems to me that the central focus of Christmas is quite different than the thrust of popular Christianity.

Before I go any farther, I hope you won’t think that I am opposed to church or to gathering for worship. Nothing could be farther from the church. Worship services are important and participating in worship with other people of faith is a critical element in living as a Christian.

Prayer is central to my life and to the life of every person of faith. It is a discipline that requires time and attention and energy. I am not opposed to prayer.

Reading the Bible is another love of my life. And I recommend serious Bible reading and study for all people who want to understand more fully, connect more deeply and live lives of faith.

But the central message of Christmas isn’t about worship or prayer or Bible study.

Christmas is the season when we celebrate not our motions toward God, but God’s coming to us. God enters our daily life. God is a part of our relationships, our work, our emotions, God comes to every dark corner of this universe with hope and peace and joy and love. It seems to me that the story of Christmas is the simple truth that there is no place where God is absent.

I often see this simple truth. Sometimes I am sitting on the lake in my canoe watching a sunrise and I say, “Wow! That is so beautiful!”

For me there is nothing that makes God seem more present in this world than when someone hands you an infant. I remember the sensations from the first time I held our son and the first time I held our daughter as clearly as any memory I have. I have nearly identical reactions to the times I spend with our grandchildren. And I see it every time a child is brought to our church and his or her parents trust me to hold the little one. “My goodness!” I think, “Where are these overwhelming feelings coming from?”

The answer, of course, is God.

God loves us so much that we don’t have to go to God, or seek God. God comes to us in ways that we cannot ignore.

No matter how crazy this world gets, no matter how secular our society seems, no matter how far we drift away from the lives we are called to lead, God appears. Hand someone an infant and they cannot escape being swept up in wonder.

It isn’t that I don’t want people to come to church. I do.

It isn’t that I don’t want people to read the Bible. I do.

It isn’t that I don’t want people to pray. I do.

Beyond those things, what I want for Christmas is for people to open their eyes and see how much God loves them - and how much God is present in everything.

Incarnation is the union of the divine and the human. God becomes human so fully that there is no distinction. That is the Christmas miracle. God isn’t distant and inaccessible and hard to find. God is the essence of everything - present in our work and play, in our relationships with others, in the people we like and those we don’t like. God is sleeping under the bridge with the homeless and seeking to be known by those we have labeled enemy.

Tomorrow is the fourth Sunday of Advent preparation. In our tradition, we turn our attention to Mary and her acceptance of God’s call to the task of bearing God to the world. Her song is in the past tense - she doesn’t speak of what God is about to do, but what God has already accomplished.

God has come with good news and justice and everything we need.

Our role is to recognize what has already happened. And to greet God in every part of our lives.

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One of my friends likes to tease me about the fact that I don’t watch very much television and I rarely go to the movies. The line that gets used is “culturally deprived.” It is a kind of a take off on the Musical “West Side Story” where Action and the Jets sing about why they are in trouble all of the time.

I’m not really deprived of anything. I just make choices about how to spend my time and I find other entertainments more engaging than watching television. My friends are always asking me if I have seen the latest movies and the answer is almost always, “no.” I could go to movies. I do appreciate that they represent an art form that interprets our culture. I just enjoy curling strips of wood with a plane in my garage and am prone to staying at home.

I think it is important to recognize, however, how much popular media, especially television and movies, affect our culture. The truth is that if I wanted to really figure out why people do the things that they do, it would be important to become a student of all of the influences on society. Among those influences are visual media.

A lot of people who married back when we did ended up naming their daughters Jennifer after the heroine in the movie “Love Story,” so we shouldn’t be surprised that Isabella and Jacob, names from the Twilight series are popular. Ann and Elsa and even Olaf have become more popular as baby names since the movie “Frozen” was released. Actually, I think that those names are great. After all, the movies didn’t invent the names, they are names with long and honorable traditions that stretch back way before there were television and movies.

But Galina, Nicky and Piper are all showing up as popular names for babies, presumably because they are characters in “Orange is the New Black.” It turns out that those names also have ancient roots. Niki can be traced to its Latin roots, Galina does have come from ancient Greek, and Piper is an English name with a long history.

“Khaleesi,” however, doesn’t seem to have any long history. As near as I can find out the word is a title (for “queen”) made up by author George R.R. Martin. “Katniss” and “Finnick” seem also to be made up names. I’m wondering how it is going to be for those youngsters to explain their names to their grandchildren. “Well, it comes from ‘The Hunger Games.’” By then the Hunger Games might seem as old as Conan the Barbarian does today.

Actually, I don’t think movies and television are to blame for the strange names people choose for their children. After all, according to the statistics released by babycenter.com, 48 families named their baby girls “Female” last year. A dozen families chose the spelling “Mavric” for their boys and eleven gave their babies the name “Arson.” I’m thinking there might have been some other options that would make for less trouble for those kids as they grow up.

Our children have Biblical names, which might say something about what I do with my time instead of watching movies.

Names aside, there is something far more important that I have missed by not watching television, however. I haven’t been getting my medical advice from Dr. Oz. Actually, I barely know who he is. But I have read that he is extremely popular. He is a “real” doctor who wears scrubs and appears on television making the complex and highly individualized practice of medicine simple and generic. Weight loss? No problem! Take some coffee bean pills. Dr. Oz picks his diseases in terms of their market appeal. He told the New Yorker, “Cancer is our Angelina Jolie. We could sell that show every day.” This guy brings 2.9 million viewers every day.

The problem is that he might not be the best place to turn for your medical care. According to a study led by Christiana Korownyk of the University of Alberta published in the British Medical Journal, medical research either doesn’t substantiate or flat out contradicts more than half of the medical recommendations made on the Dr. Oz show.

Now my family doctor is human and makes mistakes. But she isn’t dispensing faulty advice half of the time. And she doesn’t give her medical advice to 2.9 million people each day.

And none of us are immune to the effects of mass media. Even though I don’t watch Dr. Oz on television, I have adopted the practice of sneezing into my elbow, even though there is no evidence that it has any effect on decreasing the spread of germs and viruses.

There is a difference between entertainment and solid medical advice. Sadly, some of the folks in our society aren’t paying much attention to that difference. And a significant amount of bad advice is getting circulated. I don’t know if people could watch the show, even knowing that about one third of what is said has its basis in solid medical practice, without being influenced by the other two-thirds of what is said.

But then, I’m shaped by literature and one couldn’t claim that a significant percentage of literature is based in solid research.

Actually, I’ve gotten to the place where I am sort of proud of the fact that i don’t watch much television. I’m pretty sure that my friends can catch a note of condescension and even smugness in my voice when I say, “I never watch that.” After all, none of us has the option of living outside of our culture and our culture is shaped by all kinds of influences, including media.

But I have been known to ask the receptionist to turn off the television set in the doctor’s office waiting room. I wonder what they do when Dr. Oz comes on. It might be a bit like a television in an airport lounge playing an episode from the History Channel’s series of famous plane crashes.

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There are far too many stories in the world for one person to tell. As a storyteller, i have specialized in one particular genre: the stories of the Christian bible. In that corner of literature and tradition, blended and reconfigured families get mixed reports. In the story of Ruth and Naomi, for example, the two widows stick together despite the social conventions that would have Ruth return to her family and Naomi to hers. Ruth is so devoted to her mother-in-law that she is willing to do whatever it takes to defend her, including an arranged affair with a kinsman that results in a child given to Naomi to reestablish her rights to property and support in her old age. The story proves to be crucial in the overall narrative because the child appears in the genealogies of Jesus. Were Ruth to have returned to her own people instead of sticking with Naomi, the child isn’t born, the lineage is broken and there is no baby Jesus born generations later.

Things aren’t so gentle in the reconfiguration of David’s family in the wake of his torrid affair with Bathsheba. After forcing himself upon the beautiful woman he sees at first from afar, David plots the death of her husband to cover up the affair. The result is anguish and tragedy and the death of an innocent infant.

In general, Biblical stories acknowledge the reconfiguration of families new futures are born of the mixed up relationships that we humans forge. Even the story of David and Bathsheba results in yet another glorious king for Israel. Solomon’s feats include the construction of the first temple at Jerusalem and the consolidation of the wealth, power, and influence of the monarchy.

Reconfigured families don’t get as good a play in fairy tales. My knowledge of the classic fairy tales is limited, but it certainly seems as if there are no stepmothers in the tales of the Grimm brothers who are not evil.

Rapunzel is given to an evil witch to save her father from an unknown fate. The witch proves to be a poor mother and Rapunzel ends up locked in a tower.

Cinderella’s evil stepmother comes with two evil stepsisters and it appears at first as if Cinderella’s life will be one of near-slavery as the stepmother does everything in her power to marry one of the sisters to the prince and keep Cinderella from even becoming known by such a desirable suitor.

Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother tries everything in her power to get rid of here husband’s children, including arranging for them to be abandoned in the woods and left to their own fate in the wilds.

Snow White’s stepmother proves to be no special blessing to the young girl and her jealousy over the beauty of her step-daughter nearly results in the death of the girl.

In nearly every on of the tales of the Grimm Brothers, stepmothers are a reality of life. Mothers die, new mothers come into the picture, and the way that the stepmothers survive is to stop the advances of the children - at any cost, including the destruction of the children.

I’ve been thinking about stepmothers because this weekend I will officiate at the wedding of a reconfigured family. It is a common occurrence in our society and I am always pleased when couples come to the church to make sacred commitments on the occasion of their marriage. But not all marriages last a lifetime. And the church is not only in the business of enabling people to make enduring and lasting covenants, it is also in the business of conveying God’s forgiveness. And in our stories, as contrasted with those of secular society, there are many examples of good coming out of the reconfiguration of families.

Still, there are three adolescents who are gaining a stepmom this weekend, and one hopes their relationship with her turns out better than is the case with the fairy tales.

And the wedding in which I am involved is just one of 2.3 million weddings performed in the US each year. That breaks down to 6,200 weddings a day. One third of those getting married each year have been married before, which means the potential for a couple of thousand new stepmothers each day. Of course the real number is smaller than that because not every man who has previously been married is a father.

Still the business of making new stepmothers is a big business. Weddings comprise a $72 billion industry. The average wedding runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. Given the fact that I officiate at a lot of weddings, including the one this weekend, with budgets in the hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands, there must be quite a few million dollar weddings to bring up the average. In general second and third marriages are smaller and less expensive than first marriages.

But, since in our society the leading scenario is divorce, not the death of a partner, and estimates of the cost of a divorce range from about $15,000 to $100,000. You get the picture. Reconfiguring families takes a pretty good slice out of the inheritance.

I can understand why children come to expect that stepmothers will be evil.

Real life, however, isn’t a fairy tale. Although stories inform and sometimes shape our understanding of the world, the reality is that each generation has the possibility of bringing new futures out of the events of their lives. I have been witness to some really good second marriages. I know of cases where stepmothers are among the best mothers imaginable. Great good is possible from people who take stock, start over, avoid the mistakes of the past and get on with their lives.

Perhaps, however, the characters in the fairy tales are too exaggerated to be meaningful in giving guidance to new stepmothers and stepfathers. It is too easy to say, “Well, at least I’m not as bad as the stepmother in Hansel and Gretel!”

In the biblical narrative, the reconfigured families that bring forth futures are ones in which the commitments are deep and lasting. That is why I work especially hard with couples in planning their marriages. And, just like the relationship between Ruth and Naomi, I spend a bit of extra time, checking in with the children to see whether or not they are ready to make commitments to the emerging family as well as the parents.

Even though many fairy tales end with the words, “happily ever after,” the children and adults of reconfiguring families deserve something better than fairy tale endings.

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Because I built wood strip boats, several of my friends have suggested that I check out the canoe that is hanging in an urgent care facility on the north side of our town. They have commented on the excellence of the craftsmanship and the beauty of the boat. As I understand it, the boat is part of the decor of the waiting area in the medical facility.

I know of people who build boats like that. I have seen a few boats that are so immaculately constructed that they are works of art worthy of the finest museum. In fact there are boats that have been constructed for both historical and art museums that have never seen the water. They were designed and constructed to be displayed for others to see their shape and form and beauty.

A boat is a lovely thing. I really enjoy looking at boats.

But so far I have not gone to see the canoe hanging in the urgent care center. That particular boat doesn’t seem to call to me yet.

I know of some really good boat builders who are very happy building boats for others. Some of my supplies are purchased from shops that specialize in building strong, beautiful and functional boats for others. The craftsmen and craftswomen of these shops seem to enjoy their work and gain great joy out of the delight of their customers in the boats that they make. Northwoods Canoe in Atkinson, Maine, recently completed its 1,000th hand-made wood and canvas canoe. The proprietor of the shop, Rollin Thurlow is one of the world’s finest boating craftsmen. They devised a really fun and fair contest to give away the boat and I’ve seen pictures of the winners paddling their boat across a lake.

I admire boat builders who are able to produce consistent quality and beauty in their work.

I am, however, a different kind of boat builder. I’ll never make 1,000 boats. To date, I have built three canoes, two kayaks and one rowboat. A third kayak is under construction in my garage. I’ve restored a couple of other boats. At my current rate, I might make it to ten boats by the end of my life.

On the other hand, I have personally paddled one of the boats i made by hand in the waters of the Black Hills, down the Yellowstone in Montana, in various lakes in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alberta. In the Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean, in the Atlantic Ocean and the Bay of Fundy, in Lakes Superior, Huron and Michigan and a host of lakes in Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. And that is just one of my boats.

The way I build boats, the result is not a finished product that is somehow “finished” and ready to be displayed for the world to see. My product is a kind of performance art, I guess. My boats are continually in search of new waters, fresh sunrises and new experiences. For me there is a continuity between building and paddling. Both are a part of the same creative process.

It is not unlike the practice of telling stories. A truly great story is never over and completed. It is a relationship between the story itself, the teller and those who hear the story. As a passionate story teller, there is much I can do to strengthen my relationship with the story. I can study it, memorize it, look at it again and again. I can examine its impact on my life and on the lives of others. I can practice my vocal inflection and gestures and facial expressions. I also have the ability to strengthen my relationship with those who hear the story. I can get to know them, their thoughts and intentions, their hopes and dreams, their struggles and pains. But these things that I can do, are in search of something that is beyond me. The reason I tell stories is to develop the relationship between the story and the people who hear it. Maybe if I tell it well enough the hearers will also fall in love with the story. That is the hope.

So I am never finished telling a story. There is always a new opportunity to tell it again. And the next time I tell the story, the context will be different. I will be different. The people who hear it will be different. Each telling is a fresh opportunity to make the story come alive in the lives of those who hear it.

The stories I love best were in circulation millennia before I was born:

“And it came to pass in those days, the there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be enrolled . . .”

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the earth. And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. . .”

“And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ . . .”

“Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus saying, ‘Where will you have jus prepare for you to eat the passover?’ . . .”

These and other stories are never finished. We keep telling them again and again. And they will be told by generations of people long after our time on this earth is finished.

So, for now, I’m not attracted to a canoe that was built to hang indoors in the same way that i am attracted to a boat in the water.

And I am not intrigued by people and places where religion is all figured out, set in stone, and all of the answers are discovered and known. A living faith encountering real doubts engaged in the real struggles of life is more fascinating to me.

The boat in my garage will last a century or more if it is properly maintained. I might own it for a quarter of that time. I hope that the next owner doesn’t hang it up for display, but finds opportunities to put it in the water.

And I hope that those who hear the stories of our Bible won’t just keep them in a book for show, but will use them to navigate the sometimes rough waters of real life.

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Some of the family stories that were told when I was a child were repeated often enough that I can re-tell them in a manner that seems to me to be faithful to the way the stories were told to me. There is a story of a Christmas when my father’s parents went to town leaving the older children to take care of the young ones. There was nothing uncommon about the kids being in charge for a day. This particular trip, however, was just before Christmas and the parents were going to bring home Christmas gifts. A blizzard raged through the area and the parents were unable to make the return trip when they had planned. I am not sure of the length of the delay - perhaps it was just a single overnight, or maybe a couple of days. At any rate, the kids at home had to take care of themselves for an extra amount of time and Christmas was delayed. When the story was told, there was no sense of danger. The children at home had plenty of food and were warm and safe from the storm. They knew how to behave and how to get their chores done without danger.The story was told with a bit of worry - they didn’t know whether the parents were stranded somewhere out on the road or safe in town. But the story also has a happy ending. The parents returned, Christmas came, and there were presents and a special Christmas feast for all.

There are, however, other family stories that I know only in part. Somewhere in one of my father’s stories there is a mention of Snow Goose, an Indian maiden. I don’t know any details. I think that the story is that somewhere in our family tree there is indigenous blood, but I have no memory of my father ever saying how this person fit in. I don’t know if it is on his mother’s side of the family or his father’s. I don’t know if there was a marriage or if the relationship was less formal. Were I to try to unravel the story, it might make sense to follow my father’s mother’s side of the family. His father’s side of the family were in Dakota Territory for only parts of three generations. They homesteaded, starting with a half-buried sod-home and build a reasonable farming operation near Spirit Lake, also known as Devil’s Lake in eastern North Dakota. His mother’s family had a slightly longer tenure in the land, having come from the Red River region that was settled by Scotts and Metis a few decades earlier.

But I don’t have enough information to know how to learn more of the story. The name Snow Goose, seems almost made-up. It could be the translation of a Dakota name, or it could be a bit of family lore.

there are a lot of other stories of a similar vein. I have bits and pieces of the family story, but don’t know many details.

It is slightly different with my mother’s side of the family. There are some pretty complete journals that were kept by relatives to which we still have access. Among the most complete are the journals of Roy Russell, my mother’s maternal grandfather. Roy was a trained court reporter and was present for some pretty dramatic moments in the early days of the formation of the Montana territorial government. In addition, the family were staunch Methodists and he would occasionally record most of a sermon that he heard. Among the sermons he kept were a few by Brother Van, a pioneer Methodist circuit rider who achieved a prominent place in the story of the Methodist Church in Montana. A second-cousin of mine did extensive research on Brother Van and presented a paper at a Methodist Conference a few years back. I was able to attend the conference and listen to a panel discussion that also included Robert Lind who wrote a book about Brother Van. Brother Van is credited with founding more than 100 churches, a half dozen hospitals and children’s homes and a college. My grandfather served on the board of trustees of that college and both he and my father served on the board of trustees of Rocky Mountain College which was the result of a merger of three historic colleges, including the one Brother Van started.

Brother Van was extremely charismatic and was very capable at drawing people to his projects and ventures. But he didn’t preach from manuscripts. There are no copies of his sermons left. So grandpa Roy’s journals are the most complete and accurate records of his preaching that exist.

Of course the stories of Brother Van have become more important to me than to some other members of the family because of my chosen vocation. My brother, who has made multiple cross-continent bicycle trips is more interested in Grandpa Roy’s travels by bicycle. Part of our family folklore is that Grandpa Roy traveled to both Yellowstone and Glacier Park regions by bicycle. It was a pretty significant feat in the days of horse travel. There were no paved roads in either area at the time.

Of course family stories are always vulnerable. Each generation sifts and sorts. Some stories get told and others do not. I’m unlikely to tell stories of Snow Goose to my grandchildren. I don’t have enough information to have a story to tell and the name itself may fade from our family memory. Already it has very little significance for me.

What I do remember is that my father told the Snow Goose story as a way of teaching tolerance and respect for Native Americans. We lived near the Crow Reservation and there were plenty of people in our town who were derogatory and even explicitly racist in their talk and interactions with Native people. My father didn’t approve of those attitudes and would tell about Snow Goose to make a connection - to say that we may have common ancestors.

Perhaps, even if I don’t know enough of the story to tell it, I might at least remember to attitude of respect and connection with different cultures and find a story for my grandchildren that will pass down the values that I was taught.

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I didn’t write about Sandy Hook yesterday, though it was on my mind. The day was too busy, my grief was too fresh coming home from two funerals, and I needed a bit more time to think and sort. So, in a sense, today’s blog is a day late.

It has been two years since the tragedies of December 14, 2012. Here is a list of the children and adults who were killed on that day at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I think it is important to look closely at the ages as one reads the list:

Charlotte Bacon, 6
Daniel Barden, 7
Olivia Engel, 6
Josephine Gay, 7
Ana Marquez-Greene, 6
Dylan Hockley, 6
Madeleine Hsu, 6
Catherine Hubbard, 6
Chase Kowalski, 7
Jesse Lewis, 6
James Mattioli, 6
Grace McDonnell, 7
Emilie Parker, 6
Jack Pinto, 6
Noah Pozner, 6
Caroline Previdi, 6
Jesica Rekos, 6
Avielle Richman, 6
Benjamin Wheeler, 6
Allison Wyatt, 6
Rachel Davino, 29 (Teacher)
Dawn Hochsprung, 47 (School principal)
Nancy Lanza, 52 (Mother of gunman)
Anne Marie Murphy, 52 (Teacher)
Lauren Rousseau, 30 (Teacher)
Mary Sherlach, 56 (School psychologist)
Victoria Soto, 27 (Teacher)

Years ago, in an entirely different context, I read the words of Elie Wiesel as he wrote about the holocaust: “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” So we will remember.

And we will not rush to simple “solutions” that don’t work or quick “fixes” that don’t fix anything. We will allow our hearts to be broken because sometimes broken is the only way we remain open-hearted.

Here is another chilling reality: In the two years since Sandy Hook, there have been at least 94 school shootings in America - an average of nearly one a week. Not all of those incidents involved deaths, and some did not involve shooting at others, as was the case with the incident that occurred in our own backyard on November 22, 2013 when assistant professor of physics Alberto Lemut died by suicide on the campus of South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. The gunshot was heard around 11 a.m. from inside the Electrical Engineering Physics building. There was confusion, an evacuation, worry, speculation and uncertainty on that day right her in Rapid City.

The incident is hardly comparable to what happened in Sandy Hook. That is really true of every incident where a shooting has taken place in a school. Each is unique, with its own set of circumstances. That is why a rush to simple solutions and quick fixes simply won’t work. There is no single cause and there is no single cure to the violence that destroys lives and leaves a permanent scar.

That is why we must not forget. We remember to honor those who have died, to be sure, but we also remember because we need to make a fresh effort to prevent future tragedies.

The memorial for which I long - the most fitting memorial possible for the victims of Sandy Hook - is to do the tough work of reforming our nation and world into a place where everyone’s children are safe and have a chance to thrive because grown-ups care and never forget.

Towards that memorial, we have a long road ahead.

Right now it too often seems that we are too quick to put personal politics ahead of the safety of our children.

The debate over common sense rules that work in many other countries to decrease private access to military weapons is clouded with assertions of individual rights. As long as we focus our attention on “my rights” we simply are not putting the children first. There is a difference between a rifle used for hunting, or even a gun used for self defense and a military-grade automatic weapon with 100 rounds of ammunition. Unless we are willing to see differences and make distinctions, we will never get to the point of putting the children first.

I am quick to admit that i am no politician. I don’t have the stomach for compromise nor do I have the love of big-dollar fundraising that are inherent in the qualifications for our political leaders. I don’t have the skill to write legislation that is conscious of the possibility unforeseen consequences. But it is easy to see that not everyone who wins an election is willing to put children first.

Pay attention to the next session of the legislature of South Dakota. The bills authorizing spending to fund prisons will be debated and passed before discussions of schools and children enter the halls of government.

It is not only the children of Sandy Hook for which we grieve. It is the children of our own community who daily go to underfunded schools with underpaid teachers while adults have the luxury of complaining about the amount of taxes on their 3,500 square-foot four-bathroom homes with two story entryways.

We have forgotten to put the children first.

And I don’t need to point fingers. The same is true of my own institution. Read our budget. It isn’t hard to see where our priorities are.

If we are to work toward a world where everyone’s children are safe and have a chance to thrive because the grown-ups care and never forget, we need to start with ourselves. Alligator tears, even when shed in public, are a poor substitute for a close look at our priorities.

These are complex problems. And you won’t read the answer in this blog. This much, however, I do know. We need to work together and we need to put the children first.

I’ve never met Seven-pound, 14-ounce Hazel Grace. Chances are I never will. Two years after Sandy Hook, a baby was born last Saturday evening at Fairview Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. Defying the odds, she was born at 10:11 on 12/13/14. It is the last sequential date until January 2, 2034.

I don’t put much stock in luck. But 10:11, 12/13/14 seems like a good starting point. I pray that every year of her life will be marked by a decrease in violence against children and a fresh commitment on the part of adults to make this world a safe place for all children.

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I think that my memory of my childhood is probably different than the memories that my parents would have had, but I do remember a sort of busy time preceding Christmas. There was a routine that I recognized. We had a school Christmas program. It usually involved music. I didn’t play in the band until I was in the 5th grade, so the years before that were probably programs with the entire class singing songs. I’m sure all the grades of our grade school participated in the same program. I can’t remember, but I think the program was in the evening.

Then there was our Sunday School Christmas program. It usually was the same week as the school program and I think it occurred in the evening as well. I know that we didn’t have our Sunday School program during the time for regular Sunday worship. The Sunday School program meant that Christmas was really close - just a few days away. I had a brother who was born on December 24, so our home Christmas celebrations never started on Christmas Eve - that was his birthday and we celebrated Christmas on the day.

Santa Claus made an appearance in our town - generally on the Saturday before Christmas. He’d come down main street on a fire engine and we’d each get a paper bag with peanuts and hard candy. We lived in a small town, so we didn’t have multiple appearances of Santa Claus. I think we knew that Santa pretty much camped out at a big department store in Billings, and some of our classmates would get to see him on a Saturday before Christmas, but our family generally stayed home. Our folks’ wedding anniversary on December 15 was a day when we had a babysitter and they would go out for their anniversary. By the time I was 10 or so, I knew that the excursion involved some Christmas shopping as well.

We had a few Christmas events during Advent in our home town. We sang Christmas carols at school and at church. Our programs focused on Christmas. But there also was some sense that the celebrations really belonged at home on the actual day of Christmas. There was no business in our town - not even a gas station - that was open on Christmas day in our town. I know that the hospital remained open, and the police and fire department were available, but except for a very small staff at the hospital, other essential workers spent the day “on call” at home. And in those days “on call” meant sticking close to their home telephone so they would be available. My folks ran the air ambulance, and so had to be available, but I never remember them having to make a flight on Christmas day.

One of the functions of my memories these days is as a marker of how things have changed. My perspective is too narrow to tell whether the changes are good or bad or neutral. I’m only able to observe differences. I’ll leave the judgment to others.

These days, scheduling a children’s program is a definite challenge. Their families are so busy that programs have to be planned within the context of events that are already scheduled. It is possible that many families will make one extra trip to the church for a rehearsal, but there will be a single rehearsal only, and not all of the children will be able to participate. Then the program itself has to be scheduled during the regular worship hour. Otherwise there is no chance that we would get participation of a significant segment of the children and youth who participate in our programs. The blessing of that format is that children learn to participate in worship. the program is crafted as a worship service and the children provide the leadership as opposed to a program with lots of clapping and other elements that are not as worshipful.

The challenge is that other groups want the same day to showcase their Christmas preparations. All of this seems to focus on the third Sunday of Advent in our church. The fourth Sunday of Advent is deemed “too close” to Christmas and the expectation is that families will be traveling for the holiday and that children would not be available to participate. The same is true for bell choir and vocal choir members. Their directors have to plan their special numbers to occur before Christmas, because the ensembles are short of members at the holiday.

Christmas Eve is still 10 days away, but we’ve already attended most of the Christmas concerts that we’ll get into the season. There are a few more Christmas parties and other events, but community-based events and activities are focused on the build-up. The 10 days before Christmas are more “Christmassy” than the 12 days of Christmas. With Christmas on a Thursday this year, there will be a lot of decorations that are removed and in storage before the first Sunday of Christmas. By the second Sunday of Christmas, there will be a few people who will wonder why we’re still singing Christmas Carols. After all, they’ve been playing them on the sound system at the mall since before Thanksgiving.

I sort of like being out of sync with the rest of the community and culture. I like to allow Christmas to unfold in its own way. If I had my way, we’d wait until after Christmas Day for the children’s program at church. I’d love to fill the 12 days of Christmas with choir cantatas, handbell specials, pot-luck dinners and all kinds of Christmas celebrations.

But that isn’t likely to happen. We are counter-cultural, but only to a certain point. We are also shaped by the society in which we live and minister. And in that culture New Years is a distinct holiday from Christmas and a day for football. Buy the time Epiphany rolls around on January 6 most people think the 3 kings should have already made their appearance and disappeared.

The world is changing, however. I suspect it will be different when our grandchildren are adults. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.

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By the time I came along, the family argument that has been called the Protestant Reformation had been going on in the church for four and half centuries. Some of the arguments were pretty old and worn and some of the distinctions between the different sides of the argument weren’t as clear to us as they had been to first generation reformers. Still, we grew up knowing that there were differences between our church and the Roman Catholic church. Our family was very good friends with a Catholic family, so conversations between us kids about what went on in our various churches were common. It seemed to me that there was a bit more mystery in the Catholic church, with special booths for confession, a bit of incense now and again, and priests who didn’t marry and who wore special clothing. Our ministers, by comparison, seemed a bit more common.

One of the distinctions that we discovered had to do with the rosary. We had no similar device. And we didn’t know all of the prayers that were prayed as Catholic believers worked their way through the beads. Some words, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer were familiar. Others, such as the hail Mary were a bit strange to our ears: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

At some point, I asked an adult about that prayer, and received an extended answer about we Protestants believing that we could pray directly to God and we didn’t need to go through others in order to offer our prayers. At some other point, someone told me that Catholics worship Mary.

I remained largely confused about the various positions and discussions about Mariology well into my seminary years. Later I learned some language to describe the veneration of Mary and the Protestant objections to Roman Catholic practice. I also learned that there were Protestant versions including Anglican Marian theology that were somewhere between veneration and the rejection of the study of Mary.

Advent is the one season where we Protestants do pay a bit of attention to Mary, and perhaps our focus is a bit sharper these days than it was earlier in my life. These days, we almost always use the Canticle of Mary as a response during Advent and often use it again on Christmas Eve. We Protestants have never rejected Mary, or felt that she was anything less than a major Biblical character, and the pure poetry of Luke’s reporting of her is at the center of our Advent preparation and Christmas recognition.

Focusing one’s attention on Mary, however, does lead one to a great deal of foreshadowing in the season of Advent. Our story doesn’t end with the birth of Jesus, and the rapid change of seasons from Christmas to Epiphany to Lent leads us to be reminded of how short Jesus’ earthly life was and how much our story also is the story of his death and resurrection.

Mary’s song not only focuses on God’s plan for peace and justice for the world, it also reflects God’s plan for Israel and the position of the people of Israel as servants of God:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, 47and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

For those of us who know the story, Elizabeth’s greeting of Mary and fMary’s response are bittersweet. We know how the story unfolds. Both women give birth to sons whose lives have tragic ends. John is beheaded. Jesus is crucified. Both mothers outlive the sons they bear that hold so much promise for the world.

Theirs is a position of great joy to be sure, but also one of great tragedy. They give birth not only to great promise, but also to great pain. Becoming a parent involves the risk that this one you love so much may experience gut-wrenching tragedy.

Tomorrow, when we gather to worship, our children will be leading our celebrations. With songs and a simple telling of the story, their worship service is one of the moments of genuine Christmas celebration for our congregation. We call the Third Sunday of Advent Gaudete Sunday. It takes its name from the Latin liturgy. In English the word means “rejoice.” In the midst of the season of Advent preparation, we take one Sunday to focus on the joy of Christmas. On that day we celebrate the good news of the birth, the promise of salvation and the joy of a life of faith.

But even in the midst of our celebrations of joy, even on the day of our children leading us in worship, we cannot escape that our faith is about the totality of our lifespan: the good and the bad, the joyous and the tragic. As we watch the children, we are aware that they will grow up. Many will move away from our community. Others may drift away from the church. None will remain children for long.

So we will light the candle of joy and we will celebrate without reservation, despite the pain, despite the tragedy ever present, despite living in the midst of a hurting world.

Whether Catholic or Protestant, we together share the belief that our faith does not prevent tragedy or death, but reminds us that there are things stronger - and more lasting - than the trials of this life.

Love never dies.

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Dear regular blog readers. Lest you think that I’m getting lazy, please be assured that 150 words of poetry are much more difficult and time consuming for me to produce than an essay. I have no intention of making a big change to the format of my blog. My usual will be a 1,000 word essay. These are not “usual” days in my life, however. So for one day only in place of the usual, I offer the following:

Tribute to the Survivors

We call ourselves survivors
of this truth we are absolutely certain
there are things in this life you don’t get over

We do not understand
but now we know intimately
the kind of pain one would do almost anything to end

We can live with the questions
that we know will have no answers
“Why?” we can take. “What if?” is a thousand times harder

We would never have chosen
To be in the place we find ourselves
But we will not submit to being defined by a single event

We are not ignorant
nor insensitive to social stigma
but we refuse to let others define our essence

We are forever changed
But we have not lost our identity
We are still mother, father, sister, brother, grandparent, friend

We are survivors
We are the keepers of sacred memory
And nothing can take away the memories we cherish

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For some reason the topic of the plague was brought up during a meeting of our youth group last night. I guess it is a factor in some video game that is popular with some of our teens. The young people didn’t have a very accurate idea of how devastating the disease had once been. During the 14th century, the plague killed over 25 million people. Estimates were that as many as 30 - 60% of the population of Europe died from the disease. It became known as the Black Death. The economic impact of so many deaths was significant. Labor became so scarce that it drove up wages. It took a long time before people discovered that fleas and small rodents were the leading carriers of the plague. About two thirds of infected persons die within four days.

Different diseases strike fear into different generations of people. For many generations Tuberculosis was a deeply feared disease. Get too close to a person who is laughing and you had a chance of contacting the disease. The disease could remain latent for a long time and then flair up into a deadly disease with only about a 50% survival rate. Before the skin test and vaccine were developed, victims of the disease were isolated from the general population. At one time it was speculated that as much as one third of the population of the world had the latent form of the disease. Even now, with an effective vaccine available, about 1% of the world’s population gets the disease each year. As many as 1.5 million people die each year from the disease, which may be spreading more quickly because of poor immune systems, largely due to high rates of HIV infection.

I was born just in time for an effective polio vaccine, which eliminated a lot of the worry that was associated with those just a few years older than I. Muscle weakness and paralysis, permanent disability and death from the disease was the cause of a great deal of fear among the general population worldwide. Like tuberculosis, a person could be infected with polio and show no symptoms, spreading the disease without knowing that it was present.

It isn’t difficult to remember the dark days of the spread of the AIDS virus before it was understood and effective treatment was available. In those days a diagnosis was as good as a death sentence. Sexually transmitted diseases carry a social stigma that can inhibit effective diagnosis and treatment. The battery of private sexual questions that we are asked each time we donate blood are part of the effort to prevent the spread of the disease. Though blood is now tested for safety before it is distributed, there are many documented cases of the disease being spread through contaminated blood products.

The World Health Organization has declared an international public health emergency in the face of the major outbreak of the ebola virus in West Africa. It is serious. There still aren’t enough resources in the areas most affected to stem the growth of the outbreak. More than 200 health care workers have died from the disease, partly due to the lack of proper equipment to prevent the spread of the disease. A handful of people haver traveled outside of Africa with the disease and a few have died as a result of the disease. So far there is no outbreak of the epidemic in the United States.

But there is no small amount of fear about the disease. Hospitals and clinics are swamped with phone calls of panicked people who think they may have the disease. I’ve spoken with people who are genuinely afraid that the disease will become a major epidemic in the United States.

Fear and actual threat seldom line up.

Ebola is not now a significant threat in our country. Heart Disease is epidemic. Cancer is epidemic, though death rates from most forms of cancer continue to fall. Diabetes is epidemic. Alzheimers is approaching epidemic proportions and increasing.

Americans die in vehicle accidents and by suicide in huge numbers.

Worldwide, tetanus, cholera, measles and diarrhea claim lives at alarming rates. According to the World Health Organization, malnutrition is named as the biggest contributor to child mortality.

If you want to get scared of a disease, read the statistics about drug resistant infections. If you project the current trend lines, we could lose as many as 10 million people per year by 2050 - more than currently die from cancer. Drug resistant infections are implicated in 700,00 deaths per year right now, with Asia and Africa being the places with the most dramatic growth in the spread of such infections.

If one wants to be afraid, there are plenty of diseases to fear.

Living in fear, however, rarely is a way to discover solutions to problems. There are diseases that we can treat. There are diseases that can be prevented. There is research that can reduce the devastation of diseases. Responding with carefully-studied action is far more effective than giving way to irrational fear.

Every human being will one day die. It is a simple fact. And some will die of preventable or treatable disease and others will die of other causes. It reminds me of the story of the raising of Lazarus reported in the Gospel of John. It is reported that Lazarus is ill, but Jesus delays going to him. By the time he arrives, Lazarus is dead and buried. Jesus orders the tomb to be unsealed despite the protests that it will cause a stench. He calls to Lazarus and Lazarus comes forth - a miracle and a sign of God’s glory.

But Lazarus didn’t become immortal. We assume that he had to go through the process of dying again at a later date.

So I try to keep informed about the diseases that are in this world. I try to be reasonable and do what I am able to prevent the spread of infection and disease. But I do not allow fear to dominate my life.

At last check, I am ebola free and it appears I will remain so for some time to come. In the meantime, I’ll keep using my seat belt and be careful about washing my hands.

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There was a time when I thought that all teachers were old. It was, of course a matter of perspective. My parents were actually a few years older than the minister at our church, but the minister wore a black robe for worship and from my perspective as a child, he seemed to be very old. Similarly, most of the Sunday School teachers in our church were actually relatively young, if you consider them from my current age, but at the time, I thought they were quite old. One of my grade school teachers, who I thought was a old woman, was still teaching thirty years after I went on to college, so she couldn’t have been that old when I was her student.

It is true, however, that I have learned a lot from my elders. Pastors who were older than I were wonderful mentors and guides in the early years of my ministry. One of my favorite and most influential seminary teachers was 71 when I began seminary and 74 when he moved from our seminary to teach at a school in California.

I was taught from an early age to honor my elders and our family always had a place of special respect for its seniors. My great Uncle Ted, uncle of my mother, was included in all of our family gatherings when I was a child. He was a bit of an inventor and could make all kinds of things out of surplus materials. We thought he was one of the smartest people we knew because he could make things with his hands that worked. He taught me how to cut, bend and rivet sheet metal. He made his own tools. He could sharpen knives and scissors and the blades of tools. He taught me how to use a whetstone and teamed up with my dad for instructions on how to use my first pocketknife.

We knew that we were to respect all of the elders in our town. The scoop at our house was that if you got in trouble with the neighbors or at school, you’d be in trouble when you got home. I guess I believed that all of the adults in my town got along with each other very well and that they were constantly in conversation with one another. Something that happened at school would be immediately known at home. We lived in a small town. For the most part this was true. Of course there were all kinds of small town politics, petty arguments, disagreements and other fractures in our community, but we were largely unaware of them when we were growing up.

But one does not stay a child forever. For much of my career, I was “too young” for many things. Because I concentrated my academic preparation into a few short years, I was seen as a “young minister” for all of my first decade in the ministry. Even though I had served as a licensed minister and completed two internships before graduation from seminary and had amassed more practical experience than typical, I was young in years and seen and treated as such by other pastors. I made the move to the senior minister position in a multiple-staff church at a younger age than some of my colleagues and was for some time considered to be young for my position.

Then, from my point of view, I went from being “too young” to “too old” in a very short amount of time without ever enjoying a period of being the right age. Of course what really happened to me was what happens to everyone. The years passed, my life experience increased, my hair turned gray and then white (what is left of it) and before too long I became the oldest minister in my circle of minister friends. These days in my lectionary bible study group I am the oldest, the longest-serving and the one who has lived in Rapid City the most years.

What I didn’t anticipate, which is a wonder and a joy, is that as my elders got older, retired and passed away I would have a new source of teachers. These days most of my teachers are younger than I. There is creativity and energy and enthusiasm and brilliance among those who are decades younger than I that inspires and instructs me.

I remember how excited my parents were in 1964 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize. Although he seemed old to me, Dr. King was younger than my parents and they saw his leadership as a sign of hope. President Kennedy, who had been just three years older than my dad, had been assassinated, but there were other young leaders. Still, from my point of view they were all elders.

Now the President of the United States is younger than I.

But there is a surge of incredible hope in the choice of this year’s Nobel Peace Price committee’s selection of Malala Yousafzai as one of this year’s recipients. She, along with co-laureate, Kailash Satyarthi, will receive her award from the committee in the presence of King Harald V of Norway and will deliver a Nobel lecture during the award ceremony.

Malala is 17 years old. That is the age I was when I left home for college. Malala, of course has had a lot more experience than I at that age. She is the survivor of a brutal shooting by the Taliban. She has moved from her home country of Pakistan to Great Britain. She is recognized as a writer, a teacher and a sought-after lecturer. I was none of the above at 17.

But it is absolutely thrilling to me to see a young person so recognized. It is a wonder that we can learn so much from those who are younger than us.

A long time ago, the prophet Isaiah envisioned a time of world peace and safety for all. His vision included a time when “The wolf will live with the lamb; the leopard will lie down with the young goat. The calf and the lion will graze together, and a little child will lead them.” (Isaiah 11:6)

We have a long journey on the road to peace.

We have been given some incredible leaders on that path.

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A soldier has died. There’s nothing particularly dramatic in this news. In a world of perpetual war, soldiers die every day. We associate death with soldiers. The details of the death need not be emphasized here, but the cause of death was, sadly, representative of the way far too many members of the US military die. Since 2010, the United States has lost more troops to suicide than combat. And the statistics, which show a suicide rate significantly higher for soldiers than for the civilian population, don’t include combat veterans who die by suicide after completing their military service.

On the one hand, it isn’t a new problem. The first suicide death by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge - the place of the most suicide deaths in the world - was a veteran of World War I.

But this blog post isn’t about statistics. It is about the very real pain and grief and overwhelming tragedy that has suddenly crashed down upon a family. Every soldier that dies - every person that dies - leaves behind grief and lives that can never go back to the way things were.

We live our family stories, and the dominant story of this family has been of how one can start over. Life offers new beginnings and sometimes you have to stop going in one direction and head out in a new way. In this particular family, the life of ranching in South Dakota was leading towards a pretty obvious end. Year after year the revenues weren’t matching the expenses. Ranchers don’t control the markets. They don’t control the costs of the supplies that are needed. The family was facing a very uncertain future, but it was clear that even with one full-time off-ranch income, there wasn’t enough money coming in to support a growing family. There were children who would need to be educated. There was the future to consider. Somehow they found the strength and the resources to sell out, pick up stakes and move from the prairies of South Dakota to St. Louis for three years of study for the father. The family lived a pretty simple lifestyle in a cramped apartment for three years. But they pulled together and they made it work. Father graduated and soon they were able to move back to South Dakota for his ordination and installation as pastor of a congregation. A new income. A new way of life. A fresh start.

It is a story that the father likes to tell. It is a story that almost everyone who knows the family has heard.

But somehow this family story didn’t become the story of the next generation. Or the story got passed down with conditions: “You can change your life, if . . .” “You can start over, if . . .”

I don’t know. We never know with a suicide. What went through his head in the final day? What was he thinking at his final moments? That information is forever lost and we will never know.

What I do know is that there are a lot of broken hearts.

I keep trying to compose a sympathy card for his parents and I keep not finding the words.

I have such fond memories of a sensitive, kind, caring and creative young man. I’ve known him since he was an adolescent. I thought of him as one of our “success” stories - a kid who grew up in the church and attended camp every summer, who made friends easily, who participated in campus ministries and was active in community theatre - a guy who could balance his artistic temperament and his call to serve - an army bridge crew member who interned at Black Hills Playhouse.

Suicide is always a shock to those who are closest to the victim. If we could see the signs, we would intervene. If we could prevent it, we would. But it isn’t that easy. Being sad and being depressed are not the same thing. A normal dose of guilt helps a person grow and be more fully human. Unreasonable and irrational guilt motivate a person to punish themselves. We look for medical causes and medical solutions for the aches and pains that arise in the lives of our loved ones. We often don’t know how to respond to pains that are not physical. Creative people often seem a bit out of focus to those who are looking in from the outside. They tend to stay up late at night and burn the candle at both ends, exhaustion is expected because their way of living exhausts us. A change in a sleeping pattern is hard to detect because their “normal” sleeping pattern is dissimilar to others.

And our society has a stigma attached to suicide. It is a difficult topic to bring up in polite company. We don’t talk about suicide and we appear not willing to talk about suicide. So people with suicidal thoughts tend to keep them to themselves, which does not lead to effective treatment of the underlying disorders and prevention of the suicide.

Death by suicide is the result of an illness that either was not treated or for which the treatment was insufficient. With cancer, at least we can put a name to the illness. With mental disorders, we often whisper behind the backs of others. With heart disease we can raise funds for research to treat future cases. You won’t find the clerks at the grocery store asking you to “round up” for research into the treatment of mental illness.

And the tragedy continues. And the pain continues. And the grief continues.

For a few years I would bring my trumpet with me to camp and each evening I would play taps to signal “lights out.” In the morning I’d play reveille to wake the campers. There was one camper who always wanted to play taps with me, so we would do just that. Most evenings he’d come out on the porch of his cabin in a t-shirt and boxers and play taps with me.

Now I have to play taps alone. And I’ll never play it again without thinking of a brilliant young man and what this world has lost.

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After loving our countryside home for the past 19 years, we are now officially in the city. No we haven’t moved, the city has expanded. The annexation of our neighborhood was completed on Friday and we are no longer rural residents, but citizens of the city. Not that Rapid City is one of the world’s large cities. We don’t expect much to change. Instead of a private contractor to remove our garbage, we will have the city, which offers curbside recycling. It saves a bit of time and energy to not have to haul recycling to the area drop off location. Instead of being on a daily route for snowplowing from the county when needed, we become a lower priority for plowing from the city. The city will take over management and repairs of our water system, which was the main reason for the annexation in the first place. I guess technically we switch from the county to the city for our primary law enforcement and firefighting services, though the mutual aid agreements mean that things don’t change much in that department. I guess it does leave a bit of a hole in the budget of the volunteer fire department across the street from our home, with our taxes going to the city instead of our local fire department.

As the years pass, things will change, I’m sure. The day is coming when our neighborhood will see sewer lines to replace septic systems. And I suppose we’ll have curb and gutter and sidewalk requirements some day. We’re already pretty urban in many aspects. I guess the deer and turkeys in our yard are now officially urban animals, but they don’t seem to have changed their behavior patterns yet.

We have already seen the expansion of homes, the increase of traffic and other effects of the growing area. People want larger homes and they want to spread out into the hills. And it is hard for us to argue against such moves, because we wanted our place in the country when we moved to Rapid City. Although we didn’t opt for a large house, we have a lovely large lot with ample space between us and the neighbors.

The one urban amenity that I’m hoping is a long time coming is street lights. I love being in a place where it gets dark at night. I go out on the deck behind our house and look up at the night sky and trace the movements of the constellations. I pay attention to the moon and planets. I like living in a place where it gets dark at night.

As opposed to people who live nearer the equator, here we see big differences in the length of the day as the year passes. As we near the longest nights of the year, sunset is around 4:15 these days and it doesn’t rise until about 7:15 in the morning. That means about 15 hours of darkness each day. In June, we have sunrise at about 5:15 am and sunset nearly at 9 pm, which gives us about 8 hours of darkness. That’s not the kind of change that is seen above the arctic circle, or even in the places of the far north, but it is enough to get our attention, especially as we near the solstice.

Just as the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets come on days when there are some clouds in the sky, the most dramatic moon rises and moon sets take advantage of the clouds. It has happened in the past week that I have been going or coming at moon rise and I’ve invested a few minutes in attempting to photograph the moon. I’m always a bit disappointed with my photographs of the moon. They fail to capture what I can see with my eye. Getting just the right exposure is tricky and the moon seems to wash out and lose detail pretty easily. I suspect that the great photographers employ filters with moonlight just as is commonly done with sunlight, but I know little of filters and how to use them. So my photographs are pretty amateurish, but they do give me a reminder of the beauty that I have witnessed.

The increasing trend of urbanization means that more and more of the world’s people are living in cities. As the population of the planet grows, we are packing more and more people into cities. Two thirds of the world’s population lives within 500 kilometers, or about 300 miles of an ocean. Population growth is most intense in coastal areas and the percentage of people who live in coastal areas increases each decade. That means that the other third of us have a lot more territory per person. And we’ll be down to only about 20% of the population in 10 years or so. Here about 1300 miles from the nearest ocean, it is easier to find uncrowded conditions that is the case along the coast.

They might get the roar of the ocean and the calm of the waves upon the shore, but we get the night view relatively free of light pollution. It isn’t that one way of living is better than the other, but I confess I’ve become rather addicted to the wide open spaces and the dark of night.

Of course it isn’t really dark when the moon is a full as it is right now. Even without any yard lights, I can see details on my lawn as I look out. The moonlight gives plenty of light to identify trees and even the details of the grass. The frost is staring to come on as I write and there is a sparkle as well as the glow of moonlight. It is probably prettier than the drying grass will appear in the middle of the day.

And unlike the people of the Philippines who are being battered by a typhoon for the second year in a row, the weather around here is pretty decent.

Every place has its own beauty. We are lucky to be able to see the beauty of this place.

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Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. Despite the careful efforts of historians to record the events of the attack on Pearl Harbor and of movie makers to capture the drama of the day, the common remembrance in the minds of the people is beginning to fade. I recently read that in the United States a thousand souls a day of the World War II generation are dying. Less than 1 million of the 16 million US citizens who served in World War II are still alive. A generation is passing. My parents were alive at the time of the attack, but I was not. I used to have a lot of friends who had first-hand remembrances of the day, many of whom were teenage or older at the time of the attack. Little by little the memory moves to a different place in our national psyche. It was 73 years ago.

The attack was a surprise and the results were harsh. 2,403 people lost their lives and another 1,178 were wounded. 21 Navy ships were destroyed.

The attack has been compared to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon which resulted in 2,996 deaths and caused $10 billion damage.

In a similar way, the memory of that attack has less edge than it did a decade ago. The youth entering our youth group were born after that attack. Our high school seniors were in kindergarten when the attack occurred.

Our memories are like that. Even the things that we know we will remember for the rest of our lives, take on an altered meaning and carry a decreased emotional impact as the years go by. Life goes on. We make new decisions. New priorities are established.

At the time of a loss the grief is so intense that one can be convinced that the grief will be a constant companion. Then years pass and one day you realize that you’ve gone a whole day without thinking about the grief. Then another passes. And another. It isn’t that you have forgotten. Rather the memory of the loss has been joined by other memories. We are not defined by a single event or a single moment in history. Our lives are shaped by many different events and experiences.

Who we are today, however, has been shaped by the events of the past. The way we celebrate Advent today has been influenced by the events of nearly three quarters of a century ago. The World War II generation came home from the war and dedicated their lives to building up community institutions. The energy, enthusiasm and leadership of that generation was a big factor in the congregation I serve to move out of the World War I era building where it worshiped and construct a new church to accommodate the growth produced by the post World War II baby boom. We forget the relationship between the historical events and the lives we live, but those links are a part of our identity.

This season - Advent - is about anticipation and looking forward. We are invited to focus our attention on what is coming and on the new things that God is doing in our world. Part of looking forward, however, is encountering the reality that the relationship between God and people is not a single-generation event. God has been with us from the beginning and the promise of a bright future has been with faithful people since Abram and Sarai left the land of their parents and headed out to discover the newness that God had yet to reveal. The promised land was something unknown that was in their future.

We can’t celebrate Advent without remembering that in the time of Jesus’ birth, Israel had been anticipating a messiah for thousands of years. Generations lived and died without seeing first-hand the fulfillment of that promise. The people had gotten so used to waiting that the waiting seemed to be more real than the fulfillment. More than a few were surprised by the holy birth. It hadn’t seemed like something that would happen in their lifetime.

We, however, are living in a different generation. Some of the most important events in the life of our people are so far back in our history that we have to study the sacred texts and re-learn our own history to discover the truths that were revealed. As one of my teachers commented, a lifetime of studying a single book of the Bible would be too short to gain full understanding.

If we have trouble remembering the events of 73 years ago, it shouldn’t surprise us that it requires study to have clarity about the events of 2,000 years ago.

Knowing the events, while essential to understanding, doesn’t change the simple fact that we are shaped by those events. Everyone living in the United States today has been affected by the events of December 7, 1941. The lives we live have been shaped by those events and the response to them. We are shaped by history even when we are unaware of our history.

Today gives us the opportunity to look back and to remember. And it gives us the opportunity to once again recall that our history stretches beyond the short span of the lives we live. We are shaped by the events that happened to our ancestors and our lives have an impact on generations that are yet unborn. We belong to a long line of history making that did nto begin with us and will not end when our time on this earth has passed.

Awareness that we belong to such a great history can be humbling. It can be intimidating. But the perspective can be very helpful as we make decisions in the present and anticipate the long-lasting effects of the choices we make. How we live our lives today and the choices we make has an impact on the lives of people for generations to come.

Advent anticipation goes far beyond what will happen on December 25. It is about being aware that God’s presence with our people goes on for all of the generations of the future.

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Outside of my office is a large white freestanding cross. It is lit during the evening hours and can be seen from many different locations around town. There is also a cross on the steeple of the church. There is no question that I work in a Christian organization. Often, when I describe the location of the church to those who are asking for directions, they recognize the cross. “Oh, you’re the church with the big white cross!” “Yes, that’s us.”

I guess that I have never not been Christian. My parents presented me for baptism in our church long before I can remember. The certificate from that baptism is displayed on my office wall along with diplomas and other important documents that establish my credentials as a minister. I grew up in a family that attended church very regularly. Our parents were active in our local congregation and in the ministries of the wider church. I have gone to church camp every summer of my life, including that first one when I was just over a month old when I went to family camp. There are pictures of me sleeping in the wood box of the cabin.

I am also a dedicated student of the Bible. I have studied it with vigor and enthusiasm through four years of college, four years of graduate school, and a lifetime of both devotional reading and academic study. I have some familiarity with Hebrew and Greek and I have access to commentaries and academic biblical research databases.

I claim the title “amateur theologian.” It is a title I borrowed from Karen Armstrong, but one that really fits. Theology is the study of God. Amateur means “for the love of it.” I study God for the love of God.

Contrary to what many people might identify with Christian leaders. however, I am not a fundamentalist. Contrary to popular belief, fundamentalism is not a throwback to an earlier form of Christianity. It is not “going back” to the fundamentals, as some might claim. It is, rather, a relatively new development in the history of religion. Prior to the Renaissance, there was no recognized form of fundamentalism in any world religion. Fundamentalism is a response to modernity. Of course what modernity is has changed since the reformation, but all forms of fundamentalism are responses to spiritual crises. During the Renaissance, the collapse of piety forced people to look for new ways of being religious. Some chose to see religion at odds or “at war” with the forces of modern society and found religious expression in being decidedly anti-modern.

In our world today, most major religions have forms of fundamentalism. It is at least true of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism. In all of these world religions fundamentalism has been especially attractive to new converts. In all of these world religions, fundamentalism has been associated with violence. Among the recent purchases of the terrorists that attacked the World Trade Center in 2001, were the books, “Islam for Dummies,” and “The Koran for Dummies.” Recent converts, who were not steeped in religion, nor knowledgable about scriptures became radicalized and dangerously violent.

If it weren’t so dangerous, I would be amused by how little of the history and scriptures of Christianity are known by Christian fundamentalists. They tend to be found in congregations where the clergy are not educated and where the church does not have strong connections to other congregations. Independent churches with charismatic clergy seem to attract both new converts to Christianity and those who while may have grown up with the name Christian, did not grow up immersed in congregational life. Those churches often reject academic scholarship and traditional church structures. On occasion I worship with those congregations and each time I am amazed at how much lip service is given to the Bible, and how little is taught about the Bible. “If you believed the Bible like I believe the Bible,” one preacher intoned a dozen times during a worship service in which he neither read the Bible nor interpreted its texts.

A couple of oft-quoted sentences and a few proof-texts combined with a lot of waving of the book and references to the bible without actual reading of its contents seem to be the norm in some congregations. What is called “bible study” in many places is predominantly political and cultural indoctrination with only a few verses from the Bible thrown in an nothing that can be recognized as actual study.

Despite the existence of parts of Christianity that make me cringe, I am very comfortable in my faith. I have no problem being identified as a Christian. I am pleased to share my church with others. I work to help the church grow. Having said that, I have little interest in “converting” others. My faith does not require me to surround myself with people who agree with me and I don’t need to change the beliefs of others. I do, however, challenge people of all faiths to go deeper and learn more about their own faith. There is no doubt that Islamic fundamentalists have engaged in violence and present a real danger to others. The solution, however, is not in engaging in a war on Islam, but rather in helping others, especially new converts and other fundamentalists, to dive deeper into their faith instead of remaining on the surface. At its core, Islam is a religion of peace. The vast majority of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims see Islamic terrorism as a violation of their sacred texts. You can find a couple of verses to support violence. When you consider the whole of the text, Islam is a religion of peace.

I am eager to engage in serious conversation with any one who wishes to become a Christian or to become a more committed Christian. On the other hand, I think that spending my energies on people who have no interest in our faith to be misdirected. I’d rather invite those who do participate to look closer, to study harder and to become more committed to our faith.

I don’t mind our cross as a symbol to the wider world. I have no problem declaring our identity to all who can see. But the truth is that the symbol of sacrifice is as much for me and the people who already belong as it is for others. I still have much to learn.

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Most of my life has been lived in places where the wind blows. Although we have some windy days around here, the wind isn’t as constant as it is in some of the places I have lived. I grew up in Big Timber, Montana, on the east slope of the Rockies, where the wind comes shooting down the Yellowstone River at speeds that set records at times. My father was fascinated with the weather and kept setting up weather stations. We never did find a type of Anemometer - wind speed meter - that wouldn’t get blown apart. it seemed like every time he’d say, “Wow! The wind is really blowing, let’s check the speed!” we’d go to check and the meter would be reading zero because the device on the pole had blown off. We did finally get some Dwyer hand-held meters that worked well. I remember clocking the wind at over 100 mph one day. There were days when the wind would pick the gravel off of the parking lot and cause paint chips on cars. Once I determined to make a kite that would stand up to the wind in our area. I used hardwood dowels for sticks and aircraft Dacron to cover the surfaces. We had to experiment to find a coated synthetic line that was strong enough to hold the kite. The result was a kite that didn’t blow apart in the wind, but we didn’t weight enough to hold it down. We had to tie it off to a car bumper. And the weight meant that it wouldn’t rise very high. After going up about 30 feet, it mostly just went down wind. As we played out more line, the additional weight held it down.

After going to college, we moved to Chicago for graduate school. That town has a reputation for wind as well. From Chicago we made our way to southwestern North Dakota. And yes, the wind does blow in Adams County, North Dakota.

It doesn’t take a genius to think that using the wind to produce electricity might be a good idea in the open prairies. Before electricity came to the area, a lot of the homesteads installed mechanical windmills to pump water. The devices were usually set on wooden or metal towers. The ability to pull a pump and fix a mill was considered to be an essential skill for a rancher in the first part of the 20th century. By the time we moved to North Dakota, the rural areas were electrified and many of the mills were rusted and crumbling due to a lack of parts and repair. There were a few working mills, but mostly the towers were signs of a by-gone era.

Wind power is a big topic in that North Dakota town these days. The county has approved a $350 million mega wind farm north of town. The Thunder Spirit project is set to produce 105 megawatts of wind energy to be sold to Montana Dakota Utilities. It could be a financial boon to the county, with a projected $875,000 a year to be paid in leases to landowners - a little more than $10,000 per year per tower.

The project is less than appealing to some landowners. Church members who work in town but built a beautiful rural home three decades ago stand to have their view filled with the windmills, with humming turbines and shadow flicker from the blades between them and the sun. Their beautiful rural view will be dramatically changed. I remember when they built their hilltop home. I wondered at the time how they’d live with the wind and they had a struggle finding windows that didn’t whistle on windy days. They spoke against the project at a public meeting, but it looks as if their voice was a minority and the project is on track to proceed.

This is a big project. We’re talking about 42 square miles of wind turbines.

Many of my North Dakota friends have resigned themselves to the idea that their home state will become industrialized in order to provide energy for neighboring states. The Bakken oil boom has already drastically changed life for folks in Western North Dakota. Like the windmills, oil wells produce income for landowners, but they don’t exactly preserve the scenic value of the landscape. There are more than a few people who love North Dakota because it is a place to get away from traffic and noise and pollution. At least it used to be that kind of place. Oil spills, deteriorating roads, dust, and radically altered landscapes seem to be the cost of life on the plains these days.

It seems as if our appetite for energy is insatiable. Each year we find a way to consume more and more and many of us have a buffer between ourselves and the generators that produce the electricity we consume. Still, what we do has an impact on others.

Adams County, North Dakota is where the big buffalo hunts ended. When the buffalo were hunted from the western prairies, that area was the last to be hunted simply because it was so far away from convenient access. The railroad didn’t reach the area until 1907. There was still active homesteading in the late teens of the 20th century. The population peaked in about 1930 and has declined ever since. The Great Depression of the 1930’s produced a 30% reduction in population. The Farm Crisis of the 1980’s reduced the population another 30%. We lived there in those years. We saw what happens to small towns when people move away. Since those days schools and churches have continued to close, main street businesses have been boarded up and there is a general sense that communities are dying. Anyone who proposes a $350 million project will get the attention of the folk.

But nothing is free. There is a cost to the development. It appears it is a cost the country is, for now, willing to pay.

Meanwhile, I for one, am interested in continuing to figure out ways to use less energy. One can’t help but feel that we are consuming more than our fair share.

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There are things that I know that I can remember how I learned them. My father taught me how to change a tire. When I was a teenager, before I was old enough to have a driver’s license we were going somewhere together and had a flat tire. Instead of hopping out and changing the tire, which was his usual behavior, he had me change the tire. He talked me through the process and gave me advice and helped a little by handing me tools and holding the lug nuts, but I did the work. I remember being honored that he asked me and feeling competent that he approved of my work. He taught me how to change the oil in a vehicle. He also taught me to fly an airplane. Years after he had died, when I was in a stressful or challenging situation with an airplane, I would hear his voice in my head as I worked through checklists and planned my actions.

There are other things, however, that I know, but I have no memory of how I learned them. If you swim across a river, don’t head upstream to compensate for the current. Don’t even swim straight across. Angle downstream. The flow of the river will help you swim, speed your motion, and you will end up with more reserve energy and less downstream travel than those who try to fight with the river. I am absolutely convinced that this is true. I’ve swum across the Boulder and Yellowstone rivers many times. I’ve even swum across the Missouri. But I don’t remember a teacher who gave me this sage advice.

Another river truth is this: You can run faster than the river flows if you get out and run along the shore. Even if the shore is rocky and unstable, in most cases you can outrun the river. Running in the water, however, slows you and you can barely walk, let alone speed faster than the water flow. If you drop something that floats in the water and you want to retrieve it. Keep your eye on it, get out of the water and run downstream until you are farther downstream than your object. Then you can wade out and retrieve it.

Theoretically this would work for, say a little brother, though I never really tested the theory on one. We did test it with homemade boats and sticks and other objects, however. I don’t remember ever being taught this method. It is just something that I learned by growing up next to a river.

A river has a lot to teach about the nature of life. Because we live life in motion. The world doesn’t stop so we can figure out how to participate in the flow. The days pass, our lives flow on, the world continues to turn, the seasons come and go. Everything we learn about living takes place in the midst of living.

Another river lesson. Watch the beavers. When they build a dam there are a couple of possible outcomes. Sometimes the storms come or the spring ice break up causes the dam to break. When the dam is breached, the water quickly flows through and the beaver pond turns into a stream once again. Sometimes the dam can withstand the flood and forces. In those cases, the pond begins to fill with mud and silt. After many years, the pond becomes a meadow with a stream flowing through it. Either way, the pond is temporary. The water is restrained for a while, but the essential flow of the water continues. This is true of the dams that humans build as well. The process takes more time in the case of human dams, but the river continues to flow. Water still makes it from the snow drifts high in the mountains to the Gulf of Mexico every year.

As the song reports, “My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation.”

We live immersed in the flowing stream of life itself.

Fighting the streamflow exhausts and decreases our effectiveness.

The river that flows by the place where I grew up is a mighty one. It takes any sort of stone or rock that falls into it and rolls it around until all of its edges are worn away and the rock is rounded and smooth. High up in the mountains, the rocks are fractured by ice and the chunks have sharp edges and straight sheer lines. After being in the river for a few miles, they are rounded. Down where we lived, all of the river rocks were smooth and rounded. During flood season above the roar of the water rushing by, you could hear the clunk of the rocks being rolled over by the water and crashing against one another.

I like to think that six decades in the river of life has rounded off some of my edges as well. I think that I am not quite so harsh and grating as I was as a young man. I’m still pretty hard to my core, but I’ve developed a bit of skill of rolling with the waves of life and continuing to be me even though my place in life has shifted and continues to shift. These days I don’t have to have a lecture of words for every situation. I’ve learned that one clear word that is just right is worth a mountain of words that just go on and on. It has taken me a long time, but I am learning to listen more and speak less. That took a lot of years of trying to force my way up stream. I know that it seems obvious, but it took me a long time to learn that some of the best sermons are the shortest ones.

These days, when the time comes to say farewell to one who has died - when a friend goes ahead to a place, where for a little while, we cannot follow - I understand that he is not lost forever.

He’s just a little farther downstream than I.

Fighting the current will only wear me out.

Riding the river will bring me closer more quickly.

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Yesterday we had a large funeral at our church. It was one of those times when everyone is pitching in to make things work. There were folks in the kitchen preparing a lunch, folks in the fellowship hall setting up extra tables and chairs, and folks in the sanctuary arranging flowers. In addition to the usual things I did to prepare for the service, I tried to chip in with the work that needed to be done. I had gone in early Monday morning and set up the screen and projector and later helped family members hook up their computer to show pictures for the service. I had set up tables for the displays and found easels for pictures. Before others arrived yesterday, I had printed, folded, collated and stapled the bulletins for the funeral service.

One of the things that i deeply appreciate about our church is that we don’t have rigid boundaries separating various jobs. Everyone pitches in to get the work done. Nobody is “too good” to move furniture or help with mundane office chores. Working together over the years we have discovered that some people are better at some jobs than others and we know that there are a few jobs that are less preferred. In general, however, we’re pretty good at working together.

Somehow, a funeral brings out the best in the church. People work willingly and without complaint. Our church is generous with food and time. A funeral lunch, ushers, and other jobs are arranged with a simple phone call. I don’t know how people who don’t have a church home deal with grief. I’ve been so immersed in the church that I’m pretty uninformed about how things go when there is no church. But inside of our church - in inside of other churches, I’m sure - grief is shared and people go to work and help each other through a difficult and challenging time. It is one of the moments when we are at our best.

In the midst of all of the things that we do well as a church, we seem to have one small job that hasn’t found the right persons to get it done. I don’t mean this as a complaint, but it stands in such contrast to the rest of the operation of our church that it is a bit of a mystery to me. We have an excellent sound system in our building. People have been generous and we have invested in purchasing high quality equipment. But we all seem to be intimidated by the operation of the system. From time to time we call the company that installed the system and have them come out to adjust a few things and to teach us more about its operation, but so far there has been no key volunteers who really understand its operation. The problem may not be unique to our congregation, but it seems so. I have lots of friends who are pastors and they speak of their “sound and light teams.” We have no such team. They talk about their sound board operators. We have no such operators. We all seem to be a bit afraid of the system. We don’t want to mess it up and we have limited knowledge and expertise.

So, in the spirit that is so abundant in our church, I have tried to pitch in to that place where I see work is needed. I have carefully studied the manuals that came with the equipment. I work hard to care for and store the various microphones and make sure that they are used properly. I have learned to adjust the various levels and operate the auto mixer. And often our system works very well. But there are problems with this “solution.” The controls are in the choir loft and I work done in the front of the sanctuary. I’ve been known to run up to the choir loft to make adjustments during a service, but I don’t want to disrupt worship for technical problems. Others don’t know how to operate the microphones. As a result, they might get too close to a microphone and cause some popping in the system. They might remain too far away from a microphone and it has trouble picking up their voice. At yesterday’s funeral the family wanted an “open microphone” with lots of different people sharing. It could have been louder.

A second problem with me as the operator of the system is that I have bene blessed with good hearing at this stage of my life. I can hear and understand the things that others are saying and if someone is a bit louder than another person, it usually doesn’t bother me or interrupt my ability to worship in a meaningful way.

The third problem with using me as the sound system operator is that when I am gone, there is often no one who can operate the system. On two occasions when I have been away on a Sunday morning I have received panic phone calls about the system not working - in both cases a simple switch was not turned on properly.

I suppose that I could be a bit of a dictator and simply insist that all of the paid staff of the church become expert operators of the sound system. Right now that particular job is not in any of our job descriptions, but it would be within my authority to require other employees to be trained and learn to operate the system. I have tried to recruit ushers and get them trained, but scheduling a meeting of our ushers seems to be one of the biggest challenges of my career. They tend to be individuals who know their job and who signed up to pass out bulletins and pass offering plates, not to attend training meetings.

So, for now, I have another job that I don’t relish. In addition to being the sound system operator, I am the “complaint department” for the sound system. People who have trouble hearing know that I’m the “go to guy” when they have problems. It makes sense that I have this job. It just isn’t one of the favorite parts of the work I do.

Folding bulletins, on the other hand, is a piece of cake. Outside of the occasional paper cut, there are no hazards to the job. And to date, I’ve never received a complaint about our bulletin folding.

I suppose that I am very lucky that the sound system is the unsolved problem. The important things, like caring for grieving families and providing music for worship, are done with grace and dignity.

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In the room next to my library we have a small chest freezer. The freezer provides good storage for food for our home and is relatively energy efficient. It also provides a large flat surface that is perfect for unrolling boat plans. I sometimes refer to the freezer as my “chart table.” Right now there are a set of plans for a Guillemot Expedition Single kayak, drawn by Nick Schade. I don’t know how much time I have invested in staring at those plans, but it has been significant. It takes me quite a bit of time of studying before an actual boat begins to surface in the garage. Then throughout the building process, I keep coming back to the plans, looking at details, considering how best to build a particular part, making sure that my measurements are correct and the like.

Out in the garage, what you can see barely looks like a boat. The first step was building a new box beam. The 2” x 4” x 20’ beam was made out of plywood with the joints staggered. We can’t obtain dimensional lumber in our area that is straight enough to make a strong back to build a boat, so I’ve made my beams out of plywood for all of the boats over about 12 feet that I have made. The beam then was cut down, as this boat will be 19 feet long and the tapers at the bow and stern require that the beam be tapered to fit the forms. At this stage of the building, the beam has a form at right angles every foot of its length. It has started to become 3-dimensional. For the most part the forms are properly spaced (measure, measure, measure again), plumbed and set up square to the beam. I have used small shims to get everything true, but they will be measured and probably adjusted again before I start to glue anything to them. I have also scarfed together the long strips for the sheer line - the place where the hull of the boat meets the deck. Clear wood the length of the boat just isn’t available, so the strips have to be glued together with joints that run diagonal to the length of the strip.

the next steps will be to shape the strips with a wood plane - narrow at the ends and wider at the middle. Then they have to be planed to the exact shape of the sheer. That angle changes with every form, so it is slow work. I like to match the forms as I plane, which means I have to be able to envision the strips mirrored because the angles are opposite on the opposite sides of the boat. When I get the strips shaped, I will dry fit them and hold them in place with clamps. That takes 36 clamps just to hold those two strips in place. Boat builders collect a lot of clamps. I’ve blogged about clamps before and I’ll probably take some pictures of all the clamps on the forms. It is pretty impressive. It is slow work and getting the first planks just right is key to the success of the entire boat project. After a couple of planks have been fitted on each side, the hull will take shape quickly. I only have to plane the ends of the strips, so they can be shaped, dry-fitted and glued in a short amount of time - a perfect stage for my lifestyle. I don’t have large amounts of time for boat building very often.

It occurs to me as I begin this new boat how much I like boat plans. I have plans for boats that I have already completed that I occasionally will get out and study. I have plans for boats that I have not built - and some I probably never will. Having the plans for the current project out on the top of the freezer gives me the opportunity to study them at great length. Sometimes I find myself just staring at the front page and daydreaming about the finished boat.

I guess that boat plans are a bit like the Bible. Boat plans are not boats. They are not even three-dimensional. They won’t float for long. They won’t hold any weight and they would quickly be destroyed by immersion in water. You can’t paddle a set of plans.

The Bible is not a life well-lived. It is not a description of how to organize a church. There are sections with lots of rules, but there are other sections that provide guidance on interpreting the rules and not how to avoid excessive legalism in the application of rules. There are stories of the past and visions of the future.

It isn’t written like a guidebook. There is lots of good and rich material for parents in the book, but it would probably not be the best reference for settling down a crying baby in the middle of the night.

What it is is the collection of the stories of our people. There are a couple of thousand years of stories based not just on the experiences we shared by people of faith, but also the inspiration that has come from lives of prayer, devotion and careful listening to God. Like boat plans, the Bible is complex and requires more than a small amount of study to decode all of its nuances. Like boat plans, the Bible provides a guide for a life of faith, but it is not the life itself.

The Bible is our book for developing and deepening our relationship with God. The lives we live are our contribution to that relationship. And one thing is clear from reading the Bible: this is not a one-generation effort. Our lives are part of a much bigger picture. In that way it isn’t much like a set of boat plans at all. The goal of the plans is to build and someday paddle a single boat. It can be achieved in a lifetime. I can be achieved in a year. If one were to devote full-time energy to the project, it could be done in a few weeks.

A life of faith is a much bigger project.

As such, it requires even more study.

I keep several copies of the Bible in my home and several more at the office.

Despite the fact that I have many boats, I still enjoy studying plans.

After more than six decades, studying the Bible remains another of the loves of my life.

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The stories we tell about our families not only make sense of the experiences we have, they also define the way we live in the world. When we are growing up, we simply accept our family stories. We don’t question whether or not they are anomalous, we just think that every family has a similar story. One of the stories that I knew from my earliest childhood was that family is forever. My father used to say, on many occasions, “You can’t resign from a family.” We understood that we were equally parts of my father’s family - with all of his brothers and his one sister and all of their spouses and children and of my mother’s family, with her sisters, their husbands and children. As we got older, we learned of families where estrangements had occurred, but by then the rule was set. Some of my relatives were very different from other members of our family. My dad would say, “We don’t get to pick the people in our family. We just have to get along with them.” I know now that his message was partly to himself. There were some relationships within the extended family that weren’t natural to him. He had to work to get along with uncles who had different values, different goals and different ways of doing things than he did. I can remember him rolling his eyes at cobbled up repairs with wire and improper parts, when he would have gotten the right parts and put the thing together correctly. My father hated driving a vehicle that hadn’t been properly maintained. My uncles made it a way of life.

Another family story that was ingrained into me for all of my life is that people come into families in different ways, but we are all one family. My parents tried to have children without success for years. They ended up adopting two girls. Then they had three children born to them. Later two more boys were adopted. It was an absolute in our family that adopted children were every bit as “real” as those who were born into the family. Family included all equally and no distinctions were to be made between children who were adopted and those who were born into the family.

Those stories have played themselves out in my life as an adult. Our children grew up knowing that they belonged to both Susan’s family and to mine. When relationships were strained - and they have been strained - between siblings or their partners, we just worked harder at keeping in relationship. I found myself repeating my father’s statements; “You can’t resign from a family.” And there are two children in our immediate family: one born to us the other adopted. They are equally completely our children.

What I realize now is that other families have other stories. Some families know the story, “A son is a son until he meets his wife, but a daughter is a daughter for all of her life.” In some families, it is the norm for the new family formed by a marriage to be more tightly incorporated into one of the existing families than the other. Instead of alternating holiday visits, these families form tight bonds with one part of the family and separate from another part.

In fact, some family stories include tension in the process of forming the new family. A young man marries over the objections of his parents and the family story reports that this is a good thing. Choosing love over family is part of the definition of adulthood. Separating from the family of origin is accompanied with tension and disagreement. In such families, children grow up looking for difference and opportunity to make that separation.

There are families whose stories include divorce and the sense that romantic love cannot be trusted.

In many families, love is seen as a power that is beyond human control. “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives” - another of my father’s favorite aphorisms - is applied to the choice of husband or wife. “It was love at first sight” is another way of saying that romantic love renders one without power. It is a force that cannot be controlled.

My mother’s telling of her romance with my father was much more rational. “I waited until I found the right man.” She had gone on a few dates in high school, but it wasn’t until after she had gone away to nursing school and left behind her small home town that she got serious about finding a husband. There were certain qualities that she wanted in a husband and she found them. That’s the way she told the story. I’m pretty sure that there was more to it than that. Their romance was rushed by my father’s enlistment in the Army Air Corps during World War II and she traveled alone to California to the wedding that took place in the home of an aunt and uncle with no members of either’s immediate family able to attend. But my parents never spoke of rush or risk or distance from family. Of course they got married in a family home. The fact that the minister was a family friend was given as a sign of the approval of my mother’s family for the marriage.

It isn’t just what happens, but also the stories we tell that make us who we are.

So when a friend divorces and remarries, I’m usually thrown by their decisions. When an adult estranges him or her self from their children or grandchildren, I can’t understand their decisions. When someone comes into my office asking for counsel about reconfigured families and extramarital affairs, I have to hide my shock and dismay. I forget that they are responding to a different set of stories. The scenarios they describe aren’t a part of my family narrative.

I realize that telling our family stories to our grandchildren may be one of the critical tasks of our lives. And that requires that we love not only the children of our own family, but the spouses they have chosen. We are all part of the same family. And you can’t resign from a family.

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