Star of Wonder

This morning I jumped ahead to the first set of readings from the One Year Bible.  I realize how much I’ve missed reading a substantial chunk of Scripture every day.  Whenever I start a new reading program, there’s a part of my brain that tries to short-circuit the process.  The lazy part.  Which says, “Why read all this stuff?  You’re not going to remember half of it.  You’re only doing this out of some sense of duty and obligation.  Religious zeal.  Calvinist guilt.  You don’t need it.  You’re not really going to get anything out of it.”  The truth is that, like eating vegetables and exercising, daily Bible reading is a discipline.  And as with any good discipline, it shapes you in ways you can neither fully anticipate nor appreciate until you’ve done it for awhile.

Here’s the benefit I recognized first thing this morning: wonder.  I’m immersed in a world that is practical and fact-driven.  That makes conclusions based on evidence.  At any given time the evidence isn’t promising.  This morning’s news is full of retrospectives on the past year.  Hurricanes.  Shootings.  Political scandals.  A fiscal cliff (?).  None of it points in a hopeful direction.

But then I open the Bible and read:

·         The account of a God who, by the power of his word, called into existence an entire universe, and then made us and gave us a privileged place as his companions.

·         The story of a young woman who, in accordance with centuries’ worth of prophecy, conceived a child by the power of the Holy Spirit, and gave birth to the Savior of the world.

·         A star that served as a cosmic billboard to the Savior’s birth, and a chorus of testifying angels. 

·         A psalm that declares that those who choose God’s way of restraint, and grace, and hope, will ultimately prevail.

·         A proverb that maintains that there is a wisdom subtly woven through Creation that points to the Creator and shows us a better way.

There’s more to this world than data.  More than what we can see with our eyes, hear with our ears, manipulate with our hands.  The God who set the stars in place and fashioned us from the raw elements of the cosmos is still at work, shaping and guiding our reality.  God made it good.  God continues make good that which seems to us only bad.  And God has good plans – for you; for me; for the world he so loves.  Start the new year with a sense of wonder.  

Don't Be Afraid

This weekend I watched the movie Rise of the Guardians with my oldest daughter.  It’s an animated romp in which Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sand Man, and Jack Frost join forces against the Boogey Man to win back the imaginations of the world’s children.  In true Hollywood fashion, the movie reduces the two most important events of the Christian year (Christmas and Easter) to their thin secular and pagan facsimiles.  But if you can look past that, Rise of the Guardians actually has a timely and relevant message.  In his first scene, the villain of the story (a ghoulish character named Pitch) begins replacing kids’ dreams with nightmares.  Pitch then systematically stymies the efforts of the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa, so that children worldwide stop believing in the existence of these supernatural forces of good.  This in turn saps their hope, and leaves them susceptible to Pitch’s only real weapon: fear.  Their only defense against this onslaught of evil is the message: don’t be afraid. 

Whenever the God of the Bible shows up, his first statement is, “Do not fear.” When God appears at Mt. Sinai to give his people the Ten Commandments, his message is, “Don’t be afraid” (Exodus 20:20).  When the angel of the LORD appears to Mary, and Joseph, to tell them of the impending birth of the Savior, he says, “Don’t be afraid” (Luke 1:30; Matt. 1:20).  When the angel appears to Jesus’ friends at the empty tomb, he says, “Don’t be afraid” (Matt. 28:10).  The phrase, “Do not be afraid” appears fully 70 times throughout the Bible.  This is God’s message to people living in the darkness of a broken world.

Why this message, more than any other?  Because fear is the fuel of evil.  Fear causes us to see threats where there are none.  Fear causes us to see anyone – even friends and relatives – as enemies.  Fear causes us to take what we need without regard for those from whom we’re taking it.  Fear causes us to take up arms and strike pre-emptively – when there was no danger to begin with.  Fear saps us of our creativity and our compassion and reduces us to creatures of instinct; creatures of darkness.

But isn’t this a world full of real and present danger?  Here we get to the reason God makes the statement again and again.  “Do not fear” is the command of a God who eliminates any reason for fear.  He is the God who provides everything needed to sustain us.  He is the God who protects us from the forces of evil, and even co-opts pain and loss to serve his good purposes.  He is the God who guarantees that not a hair can fall from our heads without his will.  He is the God who defeated death, and promises us new life beyond the grave. 

Random acts of violence serve the purposes of evil in our world perfectly.  They lead us to believe the lie that we are all victims – that something like this could happen to any of us at any time, and no one can stop it.  Don’t give in.  Fight the fear.  Fight it not with the mistaken belief that you can protect yourself with bigger walls or better weapons.  Fight it with faith in the

“the almighty and ever present power of God by which he upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty – all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but from his fatherly hand.” (Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 27).  Don't be afraid.