Faith in Progress

I’m now about a month away from my due date for this next child, and one thing we’ve been starting to think about is a name for this little girl. Holden and I have this system. First I go through a book of names and underline the ones I like. Then a week or so later, I go through it again and circle the ones I still like. I write those down in a big list. Then every few days, I look through the list and cross out ones that no longer work for me. I get the list down to 20 or so names, with a handful of real favorites starred, and then pass it on to Holden. With Sophia that process worked pretty well. I had narrowed down the list, picked Sophia and Isabella as my two favorites, knew I wanted Patricia as a middle name after my mom. And Holden liked the name Sophia so we were set. With Dylan, we used the same system, but it didn’t work quite as well. When I handed over my list of 20ish names to Holden he wasn’t wild about any of them. Even after the poor boy was born, we were still tryin

For years, I've been wanting to compete against the secular world of Christmas.  When my husband starts talking to the kids about Santa, I try to pull it all together by talking about how Christmas is about Jesus and because Santa loves Jesus, he thus wants to share His love with others through gift-giving.  "Frosty the Snowman" I counter with "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."  And so on.  I was flummoxed, however, when Holden came home one day with a giant inflatable Santa to put out on our porch.  Refusing to put Santa out there would make me a giant Scrooge to say the least.  But then, the solution arrived this year on Christmas Eve, when Holden presented me with this giant inflatable creche scene.  Now Santa is on the porch, heading toward Jesus with present in hand, just like the magi.  Which I guess means he can stay up for Epiphany.

Christmas 2 Matthew 2:1-12 I was reading through a recent Newsweek that had about a dozen interviews with, as the magazine described it, “people who matter on what matters most.” It included an interview with Bill Maher. I was surprised to see him lumped in with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger, David Petraeus and Harmid Karzai. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Maher’s propensity to offend, it wasn’t long before I was outraged. When asked his thoughts about God, Maher started talking about how although he only celebrates Christmas as a secular holiday, he thinks of it as a time to reassess. So far, so good – I’m all for reassessing. But then he went on to blurt out (and I won’t use quite his colorful language): “That’s the problem with faith. What it does is it kind of screws up your priorities. Your priorities shouldn’t be saving your own [behind], which is the focus of Christianity.” Without any support or explanation, he reduced my faith to mere selfishness. F

I preached for the late service on Christmas Eve, and since most of the crowd hadn't been to the earlier service with its Christmas Pageant, I decided to dress up like some of the players in the nativity story and think about how the experience might have felt from their perspective... In the Jewish tradition, a new day does not begin with the rising of the sun, as we have come to understand it. Instead, a new day begins with the setting of the sun the day before. Even through the dark and silence of the night, the new day ripens and readies itself. It is already there, waiting to break full and perfect into the light. And that is exactly where we find ourselves tonight in the Nativity story. *** (Dressed as Mary) When that angel appeared, I felt such joy and assurance – somehow in the presence of that light and holiness I thought I was up to this, but after the angel was gone I kept wondering why God chose me for this. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to pick someone older, s