Repaintng Your Nativity Set

Merry Christmas everyone. As I have been sitting here and waiting for my turkey to burn I’ve also been thinking about the story of Christmas. We almost always seem to interpret the story so that Jesus comes as close to being like us as possible. Upper middle class Christians tend to talk more about the wise men than the shepherds, or interpret the shepherds as being like king David.

Other people concentrate on how Jesus came to the unfortunate and the poor in the shepherds. Some people concentrate on Mary, or interpret the angels as singing because that is such an important idea in their faith.

If you want to know how someone thinks about the birth story ask them to draw or make a nativity set, or describe their favorite one. My wife and I got a very lovely ceramic nativity set this Christmas that quite dramatically shows how much we interpret the birth of Christ. First, you might notice from the picture that this nativity is supposed to be native American. There is an eagle on a cactus, a tepee in the background, a wolf as a pet, and stereotypically-traditional clothing being worn. But there is also a shepherds crook (out of frame) and a woman with a sheep over her shoulders, which is quite odd because North America did not have sheep until quite recently, let alone shepherds canes.

You might also notice that not only are the wise men included in the birth story here (they came a year or so later) all the shepherds and wise men are women. There are no “braves” here. In fact, there is no Joseph in the nativity, nor any angels, though there are wise women. Perhaps most striking of all, however, is that everyone in this nativity is glaringly white. I am nearly clear and yet these figures make me look tan. Not one of them looks either Native Israeli or Native American.

What the maker of this nativity set did was try to make it fit another culture (Native American) without actually removing it from how it had already been affected by our own culture (they’re still white). The thing is, this isn’t that unusual of an event. We all do this quite often. We interpret the Bible and our faith in ways that make it most relevant to us, by concentrating on those few elements in every story that speak to us the loudest. That’s fine, the problem is when we think that what we concentrate on is all there is.

The maker of this nativity set seriously missed a lot of the story, and changed some more of it. But it was to make it significant to them. I’m glad they found something meaningful from the story, but we can easily see how much more there is to Jesus’ birth than just what this nativity tells us. The same is true with all of us and our faith. I might concentrate on grace, while someone else might prefer salvation, or holiness, service, love, etc.

We each find those things that matter the most to us and interpret everything else in light of those things. To put it another way, we all dress us, rearrange and color our faith nativity sets. But please, don’t think that your nativity set is the only way it can be set up.

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Marry Her or Die?

I am finding more and more than as a Christian I cannot just listen to myself and my own ideas. All Christians need to get fed as well as feed others. Because of this I have become a huge fan of podcasted services from other churches. My favorite site to find worship services on is www.hotworship.com which is a portal to a whole bunch of churches that either stream or post their services online. Out of those, I regularly listen to Mark Driscoll from The Mars Hill Church in Seattle. You can find his messages at media.marshillchurch.org. I don’t agree with his take on a lot of stuff, and he is definitely from a different theological stream than I am, but he’s great to get me to look at a passage differently and to start me thinking. He is a brother in Christ, of that I have no doubt, and I have never left one of his messages without having something to think about.

I was listening to one of his sermons on John and he gave a perfect metaphor for modern evangelism. I hope he will forgive me if I borrow it here. Imagine that you are sitting at home, a single young man sitting in your house when there is a knock at the door. Someone you’ve never met is there waiting for you. He says that he has the perfect woman for you to marry. She’s beautiful, intelligent, just the right age, with a great sense of humor, and everything else you could want. The man at your door looks at you and says that she is really interested in marrying you. The only catch is you have to decide right now, will you marry her or not, sight unseen?

So what do you do? The guy tells you she’s awesome, absolutely perfect for you, but you have to decide while she’s still in there car. If you are like most of us, you’d slam the door in that guy’s face and tell him to bugger off forever. No one wants to enter into a lifetime commitment with someone you’ve never met before just because someone knocked on your door. So you tell the guy to stay away from you or you’ll get a restraining order, right?

But instead of immediately leaving you alone, the strange guy at your door tells you that while he understands your worry, the lady in the car has a loaded pistol and if you don’t marry her, she’s going to shoot you in the head. So either marry her or she’ll kill you. What do you decide? Most of us would still tell the guy to get out of our lives just because that’s really scary and frankly very creepy.

That’s what we do so often with people when we evangelize. We tell them God loves them and wants to have a relationship with them forever, but they need to decide right now, and if they don’t decide they will be sentenced to hell forever. Is it really any wonder we’re scaring people away from us in droves?

What a difference it would make if a good friend showed up at your door and invited you to a party with some of his and your friends. Your friend tells you that there is a really awesome lady there he wants you to meet. He describes her, but invites you to get to know her and her friends first, have a good time, see what other people think about her. Which would you prefer? If we are really inviting people to fall in love with God shouldn’t we do it the same kind, loving way that we would help two people to fall in love in the flesh? Not domineering, not through threats or trickery, but by inviting them to get to know the person, find out what they’re like from other people that know them, and make their own decisions? God is awesome, and if we let people see it they’ll think God is awesome too. But we can’t force love and devotion on someone.

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Divine Judgement

When New Orleans got hit by Katrina do you remember the reaction that conservative Christians had? They celebrated that God had cleansed this land of a plague because New Orleans is known for Mardi Gras and the immorality that happens there. Not everyone believed that answer, but enough did that it became a cry throughout churches all over the US. People praised God because God had decided to wipe out idolatry and wickedness in the US.

So many Christians forgot that people aren’t just classified into “wicked” or “saint” and we certainly aren’t segregated into separate cities of the holy and the evil. Along with those sinners every city has, countless innocents lost their lives, their homes, their families. Christians by the tens of thousands lost everything when that hurricane rolled through town. Yet instead of helping them, some of the most powerful Christian leaders and churches cheered and thanked God for the destruction of fellow believers because they saw the hurricane as the punishment of God on a wicked city.
Lately it has struck me that I am waiting for the exact same thing to happen to me. I am a pastor in San Francisco, and every time I tell other Christians where I am, they have an almost viscerally negative reaction just to the name. If one day I and my entire congregation died in a horrible earthquake not only some, but the vast majority, of Christians all around this country will cheer at my death and the deaths of those I love. They will cheer at my death, because the great plague of San Francisco will have been wiped out. Yet I, and thousands of believers striving to follow God, will have been killed.

San Francisco’s reputation makes New Orleans look like the city of God itself. Christians refer to “going to San Francisco” as a synonym for falling morality and “going to hell”. Far more Christians would see our destruction as a sign from God than even the destruction of New Orleans. There might even be dancing in the streets over my death and the potential deaths of thousands of believers, hundreds of thousands of people that God loves.

I suppose I could ask how a religion of love and acceptance became so laced with hate that the deaths of our own would prompt cheers. I could question how Christians have grown so twisted that they could relish death and praise God for the suffering of others. I could spend this time trying to figure out why so many believers want to see death of a troubled city instead of redemption.

But instead, I want to think about what we, who are the ones others will cheer to see dead, will do about this. Do we give up on them like they have given up on us? Do we spend our time ranting against those who would thank God to see us dead? No. It does not matter what others say or think about us. Whether they want us to die or succeed, it should not keep us from serving God.

The best thing we can do is not to return fire with fire, but to love and serve people regardless. Let’s not complain that people “don’t get us” and “don’t like us.” Let’s not use other believers’ fear and hatred as an excuse for why we can’t change the world. God has placed us here for a reason. The best thing we can do is serve each other and love people in a way that makes this city a place where no person, Christian or unchristian, would be glad to see destroyed.

We cannot hate back. We have to love anyway, and prove them wrong through our caring for others.

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The Struggle With Prayer Pt. 4: Sacred Spaces

I firmly believe that God is with us whether we are in a cathedral, out in the woods, or sitting in front of our TV. However, our sense of God’s presence and our confidence that God is listening is often very contingent on our location. What I mean by that is that there are some places where we feel more connected to God than others. We each have places and spaces where we sense the sacred more than others. I grew up in the woods and on the beach, and when I am in the wilderness I feel much closer to God than when I walk down the street here in San Francisco. For others, the reverse is true because they are very connected to seeing God in the lives of those around them. Some people feel connected to God in churches, or with loved ones.

We each have different things that make us feel connected to God and help to draw our attention to God’s presence in our lives. These are the sacred spaces in our lives, those places and things that help us connect with God. It is important that we use these things in our prayer life. If you feel closest to God among people, then perhaps you should consider making prayer walks part of your routine, where you purposefully go out among people to pray. If you feel closest to God while among nature, then try to regularly get out among nature. For myself, though, it is hard to bring the Redwoods and mountains to San Francisco. My sacred spaces are too far away to help me in my daily prayer life. So instead of going to them, I set up a small sacred space in my home, using images, sights, and smells from my bigger sacred space to help me connect with God. You can see a picture of a sacred space I set up in my apartment a few years ago to the right.

As I connect to God through nature, my sacred space has a lot of nature images that I took, as well as pictures of loved one and other religious images. I use candles to remind me of the nights spent reading the Bible by firelight, and use incense to remind me of the scent of nature. This spot in my house is holy, set aside for no other use than to pray with God. Perhaps you don’t have a spot where you can do that, but we all can find ways of using our big sacred spaces in our daily prayer life. Maybe you can have a scented candle to remind you of the smells of getting together with family. Perhaps you can buy a photo album and put your sacred images in that.

Regardless of what your sacred space is, make sure to find ways of incorporating it into your prayer life on a regular basis. I find this is especially helpful when I am having a hard time connecting with God. Having a specific place, a routine, images, music, or smells, that are associated with God and set aside as holy and sacred help me to connect with God much easier.

Throughout Christian history people have believed that, while God is everywhere, if we set aside particular things or places as holy and sacred we can train ourselves to recognize God’s presence in those locations better. That is what we do when we treat the sanctuary of a church different than other parts of a church. We have set aside the sanctuary for holy use only, and when we are in the sanctuary we are preparing ourselves to meet with God. We can do the exact same thing in our own homes and lives, by setting aside as sacred places those objects, images, places, music, that personally help us connect with God. It doesn’t have to be huge to be significant.

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