New Year's Resolution

Christmas 1

December 29, 2013

John 1:1-18

 

            This is a dangerous time of year in my house.  My husband is a big proponent of New Year’s Resolutions.  He sits us down and talks us through things we want to accomplish in the New Year.  Things we’d like to try or get better at.  You have to be very careful what you say, because a comment that starts out “Someday I’d like to” or “I wish I could” is likely to turn into a Plan with bullet points. 

This is well and good for some people.  The kind of people that really do exercise and practice their instruments every day.  The kind of people that break bad habits with ease.  But for people like me, the New Year’s Resolution exercise tends to be a reminder of how little I accomplished the previous year.  My Spanish Rosetta Stone got pretty dusty after it started throwing in past and future and imperfect tenses without any warning or explanation.  My gym going has not been as frequent as I would like.  I’d tell you about the other pieces I failed to achieve except I stopped doing them so long ago I don’t remember what they are anymore. 

            There is one resolution I did keep, though I ended up feeling like it was a somewhat mixed accomplishment.  Yesterday I finished the Bible Challenge.  As many of you know, last year at about this time a bunch of us undertook the reading of the entire Bible in a year.  Some of us had more success with it than others.  I almost threw the Challenge to the curb a few times myself.  I got through it at the end, though not always reading daily, and certainly not always reading with great devotion or spiritual intention. 

It wasn’t my favorite activity, I’m sorry to report.  The readings were way too long many days.  The daily meditations that came with the readings were spotty, sometimes thoughtful and sometimes sappy or sloppy.  But the biggest problem for me was how often the readings from the Old Testament were just horrendous.  I’d read it all before but I think in past readings I’d skimmed quickly through the stuff that I didn’t like and spent more time on the nuggets of beauty that I found.  This time, I was portioned out certain chapters each day and so was stuck with what I was given.  It wasn’t quite the spiritual exercise I’d expected it to be. 

But I think in the end, looking back over my year of Bible reading, it was a little like Jacob wrestling with the angel.  Despite the horror and resistance I felt about many of the readings, over all I was able to hang on until I found some sort of blessing in the struggle.  Though I didn’t know it until I found my son dealing with the same struggle I’d been having.

            This year for Christmas I gave my son Dylan the Brick Bible Old Testament.  He already had the New Testament and loved it – the words of a regular Bible illustrated with dioramas created with Legos.  There were a few bits of the New Testament that gave me pause.  The Holy Spirit is portrayed as an actual ghost, for example.  The Revelation pictures were too graphic for my taste.  But these negatives seemed a small price to pay.  Dylan loves all things Legos, so spent a lot of time with it, mostly looking at the creations, I’m sure, but sometimes also delving into the stories to see what was going on. 

           So this year I was excited to add the Brick Bible Old Testament.  The problem, of course, is that unlike the New Testament, with an occasional story requiring parental explanation, as I have been discovering all year in my own Bible reading, the vast majority of stories in the Old Testament are violent and inappropriate for children.  All those stories that are left out of sweet children’s Bibles are included in this one.  So after the sweet flood story we see the bodies strewn over the earth.  All the wars are depicted in their bloody Lego glory.  You get the drift. 

If I had done my homework, I would have seen printed in big letters on the website, “Content Notice: The Bible contains material some may consider morally objectionable and/or inappropriate for children.”  There were even ratings, showing which stories contained nudity, sexual content, violence, and cursing.  It was pretty much all of them.

Dylan was pretty shocked, and this from a boy who can turn the most innocent items into weapons.  “I can’t believe this is all in the Bible!” he said.  And reading into a few stories, where the violence very often is attributed directly to God, Dylan asked, “Did God really kill all these people?”

            It’s a good question.  A question I have been struggling with all year.  A question that anyone that reads the Bible and tries to take it seriously has to struggle with.  A question that will be joined by many more questions over my son’s lifetime if, as I hope and pray, he continues thinking seriously about God.  Questions like, why is there suffering in the world?  Why is it sometimes so hard to feel God?  Why is it so often so hard to love other people? 

            And so when Dylan asked his shocked question about God, I tried to impart my own inkling of theological wisdom gained over this past year of Bible reading.  I tried to put into words the blessing that I’d limped away with during my own wrestling with the Bible.

I’ve become more certain for myself than ever through this year of Bible reading that many of these old stories are less about how God works in the world than how the people of the world experience God and trying to find words for that experience.  The stories show the people trying to answer their own questions about God, struggling to make sense of all that is going on around them. 

To me that helps with the pieces that don’t fit how I experience God. 

I don’t believe the hundreds of little laws for living and worshipping that bog down the Old Testament were handed down straight from God.  But I can imagine how those laws came in to being, the product of a people trying to be faithful, trying to honor God, and trying to control their lives which otherwise seemed so completely out of control.  That I can understand.  That I can relate to. 

I don’t believe that all the smiting and death and destruction in the Bible was God’s vengeance at work.  But I can imagine that attributing the awful things that happened around them to God was more bearable than thinking their pain didn’t make sense.  That I can understand.  That I can relate to.

What I do believe, and what does resonate for me, is that glimmering throughout the stories that individually were often too terrible to take is a constant confidence that God was somehow always part of their story.  While the idols I struggle with and the wars that rage inside me and the ways in which I unconsciously try to control God may look very different than they did for these ancient people recording their ancient experiences, shining through is also much we share in common - an experiences of God being with us, loving us, forgiving us, inspiring us.  

            I’m not sure I did a very good job of sharing any of that with Dylan.  I think really it’s something we all work out for ourselves over time.  We all find our own ways to assimilate the stories and make sense of them, we all have to find our own ways to look for God in and through the stories, and in and through our lives.

I think maybe that, for me today, is at the heart of our nativity story for this morning.  You might have missed that we even had a nativity story this morning because it sounds so unlike the beautiful birth story that we heard on Christmas Eve.  Today there was no journey to Bethlehem, no star, no shepherds or wise magi.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus comes into existence long before that dark, star-strewn night in Bethlehem.  Jesus was present in the beginning, in the very beginning.  Jesus the Word was with God before anything else was.  And the Word was so full of light and life and love that it brimmed over into all of creation and imbedded itself into each of us.  John’s Gospel reframes the whole story so that Jesus is present in the midst of all of creation.  Jesus as at the core of our existence.

            And then the Word that had always been became human.  "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  God took all that stuff that we can’t ever seem to wrap our heads around – the intangibility and impossibility and infinity and limitlessness of God – and somehow brought them into our world in a package that was tangible and possible, and finite, and limited.  God struggled for God’s self with all those questions that haunt us throughout our spiritual journeys – the question of suffering, and the struggle with vulnerability, the difficulty of loving, and the emptiness when God feels so far away.  The light shined in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

            Which leads to my New Year’s Resolution for the coming year.  Not to lose ten pounds or speak Spanish fluently or write the great American novel.  But to try my best to hold tight to the moment where I find myself, to wrestle until I can find the blessing, until I can see the light shining through the darkness, until I can feel the love of God-with-us that has been present since before the beginning brimming over into my very core and then to try to let that light shine through me too.  Amen.