Peace in the New Year

 

Peace in the New Year

December 31, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

I write these words on December 31, 2021. Tomorrow we flip the page in the calendar. The change of the year’s number is purely artificial. It has so significance in the natural world; yet we’re so used to our calendar, and the time when the year’s number changes is so traditionally the time when we both look back at the year that is ending and forward to the year about to begin that it feels right to do some of that here. 2021 was not an easy year. It was filled with problems, so many that I can’t possibly mention all of them in this piece. Here are some of them.

The COVID pandemic that began in 2020 still comes at us in waves, often with a new variant of the virus that the scientists haven’t had time fully to analyze. Millions of morons still refuse to be vaccinated against that virus that has now killed over 800,000 people in this country. That’s more deaths than the country suffered in the Civil War, in which Americans were killing other Americans. Joe Biden was inaugurated as president. The best thing about that is that Donald Trump was not inaugurated for a second term as president. Yet Trump whipped up a mob and sent them to the Capitol to try to stop the Senate’s certification of Biden as president by force. He continues to claim that he really won the 2020 election, won it in a landslide even, and that somehow someone stole it from him, never mind that there isn’t a shred of evidence that that is true. Two-thirds of Republicans believe Trump’s lie. In 2021 it became clearer than ever that he has made the Republican Party an anti-democracy cult of personality.  American democracy is under attack in a new, frightening, and potentially successful way. Republicans in states they control are passing laws intended to reduce the number of votes cast by people of color, for majorities of those people do not tend to vote for Republicans. They are gerrymandering congressional districts to gain control of the House of Representatives though they represent only a small percentage of the American people. The Democrats have the trifecta in DC. On paper they control both houses of Congress and the White House. Yet a couple of Democrats in Name Only are preventing Biden from getting all of his legislative agenda adopted. Those DINOs are keeping the Senate from passing desperately needed voting reform that would, at least to some degree, thwart the Republicans’ effort to make voting undemocratic at the state level. They haven’t done it yet, but the conventional wisdom is that the US Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, which has been settled law for nearly fifty years. Things on the national level in this country are as depressing as hell. The one bright spot in 2021 (other than Biden’s inauguration) was the rapid availability of several COVID vaccines that the government made available without cost to the person receiving the vaccine.

Things weren’t great closer to home either. Washington state’s governor Jay Inslee has done a fine job of managing the state’s response to the COVID pandemic. Still, the pandemic continues in Washington state as it does elsewhere at least in part because so many intellectually limited people won’t get inoculated or even wear a mask in public. For me personally it is a very good thing that everyone in my family—wife, son, daughter, son-in-law, and all five of my grandchildren—have been vaccinated against the COVID virus. So have all of the people of the church my wife serves as pastor, but keeping a small church going when the people cannot gather together for worship and fellowship has put a strain on her that has affected her mood through much of the year, and not in a good way. I guess the good news is that neither of us has contracted COVID, but the pandemic definitely has restricted our activities outside our home. All in all 2021 has been a difficult year, and I haven’t even mentioned all the bad things about that I need to mention.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Day, and we are getting the obligatory New Year’s greetings and wishes for 2022, mostly from commercial outfits online. It is common for people to hope for peace in the year ahead. I too hope and pray for peace in year that dawns tomorrow. Yet the prospects for peace seem faint at best both internationally and domestically. Russia threatens to invade Ukraine. China threatens to invade Taiwan. In the US there is much talk about a coming civil war that may break out because Donald Trump’s fascistic followers won’t concede that they lose elections quite legitimately. There is a great deal of potential violence out there in the world.

Other difficulties abound as well. Climate change continues unabated because wealthy countries like ours refuse to foot the bill for doing something meaningful about it. We call ourselves the richest nation in the world, yet we continue to have an unconscionable number of unhoused people and still have no universal, tax funded health insurance system. We’re the only so-called advanced country that doesn’t. Our culture has succumbed to the siren song of military force, the only purpose of which is to inflict death and destruction on other people. We spend an unconscionable among of money on the military. We claim that our armed forces defend our freedom when in fact they do no such thing. We call everyone who is or who has been in the military a hero though few of them have ever done anything heroic. Peace out there in 2022? The prospects do not look good.

Most of us didn’t have much peace in 2021. We live with a lot of fear or at least with a lot of anxiety. The pandemic scares us. So do global warming and the prospect of domestic violence engendered by Trump turning the Republican Party into his cult of personality and the willingness of so many people to believe his lies. Many of us are anxious about our personal finances. We’re told the economy is in good shape; but you can’t live on the minimum wage, and so many employers offer no more than that. We worry about what’s happening to our children when they have to do school at home on a computer rather than in a classroom with an in person teacher.

We feel powerless. We can’t change any of these things ourselves, and our national political climate has become so reactionary that the politicians who might be able to solve some of them don’t even try to do it. After all, we might have to make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. Instead we keep cutting their taxes because those wealthy people have bought our politicians with campaign contributions and perhaps in other ways as well. None of these disasters is likely to change in 2022. Both world peace and inner spiritual peace seem to be well beyond our reach.

If we are to have any peace at all in 2022 we must begin by fostering peace in our own souls. But how do we do it? That’s where religious faith comes in. They book of Isaiah contains a fine statement of how we do it. We read these words that the prophet addresses to God:

 

Those of steadfast mind you keep in peace—

     in peace because they trust in you.

Trust in the Lord forever,

     for in the Lord God

you have an everlasting rock. Isaiah 26:3-4.

 

Wonderful, isn’t it? We find peace by trusting in God as our everlasting rock.

Yet we still have to ask how we go about gaining peace by trusting God. To answer that question I’ll start with the wisdom of the sages of all faith traditions. They know that peace in the world must begin with the inner peace of individual women and men. To me learning to trust God is the key to that inner peace. We can cling to God, trusting that our beliefs about God do not deceive us and that God will never fail us. That way lies inner peace. Any number of spiritual disciplines are helpful in creating that inner peace too. They can strengthen our trust in God. Prayer is of course the most foundational spiritual discipline. It is perfectly appropriate, even necessary, for us to pray for peace in our souls and in God’s world. Yet many people of faith in many different spiritual traditions have discovered that silence is a much more powerful kind of prayer than is talking. In silent prayer we can stop talking and start listening, listening for God’s still small voice of peace and reassurance. Give it a try. It takes practice to turn off the inner voice that is always chattering at us, often in destructive, judgmental ways rather than constructive, loving ones. With practice silent prayer grounds us in God and brings us inner peace.

Okay, but what about peace out in the world? As what I’ve already said suggests, peace in the world comes from the inner peace of the people. To gain that peace one essential step is that we must admit and accept the fact that there is much out in the world that we cannot control. We must learn what the saints know, that our call is to work for God’s realm, not to complete the journey there. We do the work though we know we will never see its completion, not in this life anyway. After all, this is ultimately God’s world not ours. Far too often Christians, maybe progressive Christians like me most of all, think we can transform the world on our own. Then we become cynical and lose faith when we discover that we can’t. The Buddhists know better than most Christians that the way of peace is the way of letting go. Not let go of the work of peace and justice, let go of commitment to the outcome of that work. Buddhist sages like Tich Nhat Hanh teach that it is precisely the inner transformation of individuals that will transform the world. Jesus taught the same thing. See, for example, the story of the exorcism of the demon named Legion at Mark 5:1-13, in which a possessed man gains inner peace when Jesus exorcises Rome and its legions out of him. Inner peace really is the way to peace in the world. We gain peace in our souls and foster peace in the world when we pray, meditate, and trust in God. All that may not seem to be enough, but it is. We think it isn’t because we haven’t yet given up commitment to the outcome of the work of God’s realm in the world.

So what will 2022 bring? There is no way to know, at least not in any detail. The signs don’t look good for deeper peace and broader justice in the world. All of those ills that I mentioned above will still be there. Yet we can still hope and pray that the omens are wrong. Then we can do whatever we can, trusting always in God’s help, to bring peace and justice to reality in the world while we give up being committed to seeing the ultimate outcome of that work. We will certainly face challenges in the year ahead. We may not know the specifics of those challenges, we just know that there will be some. Perhaps there will be many. We may be challenged, but we know how to cope with challenges—prayer, trust in God, and inner quieting. Those things will do more to bring peace to our souls and to the world than anything else we can do. With trust in God we’ll get through 2022 as we have now gotten through 2021. I wish you (and myself) success in finding peace in the year ahead. May it be so.

Not Original, Just True

 

Not Original, Just True

December 30, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

The Gospel of John includes a story that most Christians know. It is the story of a woman caught in adultery. You’ll find it at John 7:53-8:11. In this story Jesus is teaching in the temple in Jerusalem. Some scribes and Pharisees bring before him a woman who has been caught in the act of adultery. They say that Torah law requires that they stone her (presumably to death) and ask Jesus what he says about it. He says, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” John 8:7. The scribes and Pharisees all leave without stoning the woman, presumably because they know they can’t claim to be without sin. Jesus asks the woman if anyone has condemned her, though he must know that all of her accusers have left without having done so. She says no one has. Then Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” John 8:11.

There are some odd things about this story. Twice in it Jesus writes on the ground, but we aren’t told either why or what he writes. We’re told the scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus what he says about stoning her to test him and get a charge they can bring against him. The point seems to be that they could accuse him for contradicting Torah law if he didn’t say stone her. He does indeed contradict Torah law when he says something other than stone her, yet his doing so seems to have no adverse consequences for him. Odd, isn’t it?

But there is something even odder about this story that doesn’t appear in the text itself. We learn it from things the New Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, and I suppose others say about this story. The NRSV that I use has a translators note to this story that reads: “The most ancient authorities lack 7:53-8:11, other authorities add the passage here or after 7:36 or after 21:25 or after Luke 21:38, with variations of text; some mark the passage as doubtful.” It seems certain that the author of the Gospel of John did not include this story in his original text, but here it is.

So I ask: Does it matter that this story isn’t in the original text of the Gospel of John? The answer to that question depends on the purpose for which you are reading the Gospel. If you are reading it because you want to know what the Gospel’s author intended, or if you are reading it to understand the author’s original theology, then it matters. If you’re reading it for one of those purposes you’d be well advised to omit the story of the woman taken in adultery from your analysis. The author of John didn’t write this story and didn’t intend for it to be part of his Gospel, so it tells us nothing about what that author was up to when he wrote the Gospel.

Yet the fact that the story of the woman taken in adultery was not in the original version of John doesn’t matter if you are reading the Gospel for the purpose most Christians have when they read John (or anything else in the Bible for that matter). It doesn’t matter is you are reading the story for its meaning. That it was not originally in John doesn’t mean that the story has no meaning. I (and a lot of other people) have said about this story that if it wasn’t originally in John, it should have been. I (and a lot of other people) say that if this story never happened as a matter of fact, it should have, for this story sheds a lot of light on Jesus’ relationship both to the Torah law and to God’s grace. Let me explain.

Jesus relationship to the Torah, often (incorrectly) called the law of Moses is complex, perhaps a bit obscure, and not always consistent. When people want Jesus to have affirmed the law and its role in the life of faith they often quote Matthew 5:17-19. In those verses Jesus says,

 

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.[1] I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

 

These words sure make it sound like Jesus is commanding strict compliance with all of Torah law, but here’s the thing. He didn’t obey all of that law himself, and sometimes he taught others not to follow it as well. He was forever offending the guardians of the Torah, often called the scribes and the Pharisees as they are in this story, by violating the Torah’s prohibition of work on the sabbath. See Exodus 20:8-11. At Mark 2:27 he says, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.” He dispensed with the Torah’s commandments about keeping kosher too. At Matthew 15:11 he says, “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” Confusing, isn’t it?

Then we have our story of the woman taken in adultery. At Leviticus 20:10 the Torah commands death for at least a specific sort of adultery, namely, a man having sexual relations “with the wife of his neighbor.” It says that both the man and the woman shall be put to death. In the story of the woman taken in adultery the scribes and Pharisees appear to take that law as applying to any sort of adultery, for we don’t know whether the woman was the wife of the man’s neighbor or not. Jesus seems to accept their reading of the law, yet he doesn’t say, “Right! Stone her!” He says that anyone who is without sin may cast the first stone at her. Being without sin is a condition to the enforcement of the law against adultery that isn’t in the Torah. So what Jesus says has the effect of him telling the scribes and Pharisees to violate the law by declining to put the woman to death because they themselves are sinners. Yet in Matthew he says we mustn’t disobey any little part of the law. Confusing, isn’t it? I think, however, that in saying what he says in this story Jesus is being consistent with his overall message about how we are to live. If we learn anything from Jesus it should be that grace outweighs the rules or laws every time. Jesus taught us that God offers each and every person completely unconditional grace, and that includes the completely unconditional forgiveness of sin.

Consider for example the Parable of the Prodigal Son. You’ll find it at Luke 15:11-32. In that familiar story a man’s younger son gets the share of his father’s estate that would come to him after his father’s death while the father is still alive. The son goes away and squanders all of his money in “dissolute living.” We aren’t told more about what he did, although many people assume he consorted with prostitutes. The story doesn’t expressly say that he did that, but I’m sure we’re safe in assuming that whatever he did wasn’t exactly moral. The man falls upon really hard times. He takes a job slopping pigs. So he decides to go home and ask his father to treat him like a hired hand. He rehearses a little speech of confession that he plans to deliver to his father: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” Luke 15:18-19. He heads home. His father sees him coming. Apparently the father can tell from his son’s appearance that things have not gone well for him, although the father surely knows nothing more about what his son has done or what has happened to him. We read, “While he [the son] was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” Luke 15:20. Do you notice anything missing here? Like the son’s little speech of confession? It’s not there, not at first. After his father has greeted him in this way the son starts to give his little speech, but he doesn’t finish it and his father ignores it. Just as the son is giving his speech the father tells his slaves to prepare and extravagant welcome for his son. The important point here is that the father welcomed his son home unconditionally. He embraced him when all he knows is that his son has returned and has perhaps had a bit of a hard time of it while he was away. Jesus teaches us that that’s how it is with God—absolutely unconditional grace. And that’s what Jesus extends to the woman caught in adultery. The law said he should stone her to death. He doesn’t. Instead he tells her that he does not condemn her and lets her go, giving her only a gentle admonition not to sin anymore.

Does this meaning of the story of the woman taken in adultery depend on the story having been in the original draft of the Gospel of John? Of course not. The meaning is there regardless of where the story came from, when it was inserted into the Gospel, and who inserted it, none of which we know. Some unknown ancient sage thought that the story was meaningful enough to insert it into John (or perhaps Luke) though it wasn’t originally there. Its meaning matters, not its origin. That meaning certainly contradicts what Jesus says at Matthew 5:17-19. Jesus’ teachings and his life itself teach us that with God grace trumps the law every time. Grace should trump the law every time for us too. Only if it does can we be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. So next time someone tells you that you or someone else has sinned by violating some supposedly divine law, just remember the story of the woman taken in adultery. Jesus does not condemn you. He just sends you on your way with an admonition not to sin anymore. Thanks be to God!

---

[1] By “the law or the prophets” Jesus means all of what was the Hebrew Bible in his day, but we’ll just focus here on the law.

Examples of How to Read the Bible

 

Examples of How to Read the Bible

December 27, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

Have you ever had the experience of reading a passage in the Bible and saying, “I don’t think so!”? I have. I have that experience all the time. Sometimes the passage is something I can’t and never will accept, something in which I am able to find no truth at all. God supposedly telling Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites is one of those. See 1 Samuel 15:1-3. God never told anyone any such thing, Leviticus calling for death as the penalty for all sorts of transgressions of the law is another. See Leviticus, Chapter 20. God does not desire and certainly does not demand the death of anyone, Matthew saying repeatedly that God will cast sinners into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth is one from the New Testament. See for example Matthew 8:12 and 13:42. God is love, and love never has and never will do any such thing, But sometimes Bible passages are a lot more complicated than being either only right or only wrong. I came across one of those recently when a daily lectionary I use had me read 1 John 5:1-12. Those verses include lines that at first reading seem to me to be just wrong. Especially when I read 1 John 5:3-5 and 1 John 5:12 I thought just No! But then I discerned possible meanings in them are aren’t wrong at all. Let me explain.

1 John 5:3-5 reads:

 

For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who it is who conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

 

When I first read those lines earlier today I thought, are you kidding me? Faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God has conquered the world? I sure don’t think so! I mean, yes, Christianity is the largest religion in the world. If you count all of the multitude of varieties of Christianity there are in the world, several thousand of them in fact, there are more than two billion Christians. That means, however, that there is something like five billion people w aren’t any kind of Christian, and I won’t even attempt to analyze the extent to which all of those two billion people who say they are Christians really are Christian in any meaningful sense.

More Importantly, if faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God really conquered the world, that conquered world would run according to true Christian principles, wouldn’t it? Those principles include nonviolence and true care for the world’s poor, vulnerable, and marginalized people. They include discerning what it is that leaves so many people poor, vulnerable, and marginalized, then working to change those things. Does the world really operate according to those principles? Well, some of it does but certainly not all of it. The world is and always has been awash in the blood of people who are victims of violence from personal assault to all the way to outright warfare. Oppression of the poor, vulnerable, or marginalized people pervades the earth from the way society and church marginalize women to human sex trafficking and slavery. Back in his day St. Paul drew a sharp distinction between the ways of God, which he usually called the ways of spirit, and the ways of the world. Two thousand years later that distinction still holds. Christian faith has conquered the world? I sure don’t think so, not in the sense of the statement I’ve addressed here.

Then I remembered how Jesus thought we should conquer the world. We see that teaching in the story of Jesus exorcizing the demon named Legion at Mark 5:1-13. In that story, which I think we should consider to be a parable even though it doesn’t say it is a parable, Jesus exorcizes a demon named Legion, who turns out actually to be something like two thousand demons all possessing one unfortunate man. The demon was named Legion, but when the first audience for that story heard the word legion they would immediately have thought of the Roman army that occupied their homelands. See, a legion was a basic organizational unit of the Roman army, something roughly like a division in today’s army. To Jesus audience legion meant the power of Rome. We learn that this possessed man’s problem wasn’t that Rome was out there, though it most certainly was. His real problem was that Rome was in here. His real problem was that he had internalized Rome. He had internalized the violent, oppressive ways of the world. Those ways gave him great physical strength, but they also drove him mad. He regained his right mind when Jesus exorcized the ways of the world out of him.

In a very real sense the possessed man of this story conquered the world, and he did it through Jesus Christ. That, it seems to me, is the proper way to understand 1 John’s statement that faith in Jesus Christ conquers the world. Our faith in God in and through Jesus can lead us to overcome the world with its ways of violence and oppression, and God is always there to help us do it. We can’t really help but to have internalized many of those worldly ways. I’ll use nonviolence as an example. I have found that the hardest aspect of Jesus’ teachings to convince people today to accept is precisely nonviolence. The world has so convinced us that violence is necessary at least for defensive purposes if not for offensive ones and that violence is therefore at times morally acceptable. Jesus said no to all violence. God says no to all violence. The divine commitment to nonviolence so clashes with the world’s belief in the necessity and moral acceptability of violence that most of us find it had to accept the teaching of divine nonviolence. Yet if we will truly understand and cling to Jesus Christ we can even overcome the world’s grossly erroneous belief that violence solves problems. With God’s help our Christian faith really can conquer the world. Perhaps not the world out there. Definitely the world in here.

Then there’s 1 John 5:12. That verse reads, “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” At first reading that verse sounds far too Christian exclusivist to be acceptable. Perhaps in the first century CE when 1 John was written the tiny, utterly powerless Christian community could say Christianity is the only way without much harm. Today we cannot. We simply can no longer deny that people of faiths other than Christianity, and even some people of no faith at all, lead full, constructive lives. People of other faiths have a meaningful, positive relationship with God through their non-Christian faiths. It makes no sense to say that God condemns those good people simply because they are not Christian. It makes no sense for us to say that God, whom we confess to be Creator of all that is and to be infinite love, would create the vast diversity of humanity and of human faiths, then say that only one of those faith is true and valid—and it’s the is the one that just happens to be ours.

Now, we Christians know that our Christian faith, our having the Son as 1 John puts it, can indeed lead us to life, to the fullness of live that God wants for each and every person. Many of us have experienced how our Christian faith has enriched our lives. That those who have Son have at least possible access to the fullness of life is certainly true. That’s not the part of 1 John 5:12 that gives me trouble. The part that gives me trouble is the phrase “whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” Taken literally that statement just isn’t true. If “whoever does not have the Son” means what it appears to mean, namely, everyone who is not Christian, then we must reject this part of 1 John 5 as false and unacceptably Christian exclusivist.

So is there a way to understand this verse that is neither false nor Christian exclusivist? I think there may be. Verse 12 of 1 John 5 deals with having “life.” By “life” the verse surely means more than being biologically alive. It surely means having the fullness of life. It means life lived in healthy relationship with God, beloved other people, and God’s good earth. It means a constructive life lived making life better for those you know and those you don’t know who most need care and justice. That’s life, the kind of life God wants for each one of us.

We Christians know that living our life with Jesus Christ can lead us to that fullness of life. If we’re observant and honest, however, if our minds are not closed by religious ideology, we will see that a great many people who are not Christians have that kind of life too. Many of those people live that kind of life with a healthy relationship with God not through Jesus Christ but through the beliefs, teachings, and rituals of one of the world’s other great faith traditions. Is it too much of a stretch to say that those good people “have the Son” in a meaningful way though they are not Christians and do not live their lives of faith with and through him? If it is too much of stretch, then I must reject the contention of 1 John 5:12 that those who do not have the Son do not have life. But if we can understand “have the Son” to mean not specifically to be Christian but to live in health relationship with God through whatever faith in which we find that relationship then I can say yes, this statement is correct. Consider this if you will. To us the Son is the Second Person of the Trinity. As such the Son is simply, or really not so simply, God. Surely God is at work in the lives of all good people on earth. To us the Son is God. To others the Lord, or Allah, or some other name for God is God. Under that name whatever it may be God is at work in the lives of God’s people. So anyone who has God really in a sense has the Son whether they call God the Son or not. With this understanding I can and do say yes to 1 John 5:12.

So I need to remind myself, and I remind you, not to dismiss a Bible verse just because at first we don’t see anything of value in it. Bible verses can and usually do have more than one meaning. Sometimes one meaning that actually is there is one I cannot accept. Sometimes at least if I will spend more time with the verse I’ll find another meaning in it that does speak truth to me and to God’s world. It is at the very least worth making the effort to see if a verse has such another meaning. So when you read a Bible verse that you cannot accept don’t give up on that verse right away. Consider it. Pray over it. Maybe even seek out some scholarly commentary about it or discuss it with other people of faith. If you will do that you may just find the verse meaningful for you and for God’s world.

Once More on Russia and Ukraine

 

Once More on Russia and Ukraine

December 23, 2021

 

Many years ago I, your humble author, earned a PhD in Russian history. I lived in Moscow for the 1975-76 academic year with my late wife and our son, who turned two while we were there. I have written and spoken publicly about the relationship between Russia and Ukraine before, but it seems that tensions between Russia and Ukraine are increasing in recent times. It is clear to me that very few Americans know anything at all about Russian history and how Ukraine fits into that history. Our leaders either don’t know that history either or, more likely, have had it explained to them but chosen to ignore it or just don’t understand its significance. My purpose here is not to defend Vladimir Putin. He is an authoritarian ruler who fits perfectly into Russian history. He doesn’t need me to defend him, and my purpose here is to explain not to judge. I write here because the history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine really does matter if we are to understand Russia and Putin well enough to avoid going to war over Ukraine. I’ll start with more recent events in the Russia-Ukraine relationship before looking briefly at the more distant nature of that relationship.

Because it had been part of the Russian Empire since the late eighteenth century, Ukraine became one of the republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when that entity was created in 1922.[1] Communist bureaucrats in Moscow set the boundaries of that soviet republic. Doing so could not have been easy. Especially in the eastern part of what became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic there are no clear demographic lines between Ukrainians and Russians. Those two cultural identities overlap. There are significant parts of Ukraine where many of the people are Russians not Ukrainians. Yet those soviet bureaucrats did establish a boundary between the Ukrainian republic and the Russian one. When they did they assigned the Crimean peninsula to the Russian republic not the Ukrainian one though Crimea is geographically contiguous with Ukraine not with Russia. For reasons no one really understands, in 1954 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred the Crimea from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian one.

The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 25, 1991, and had been falling apart for several years before that. Each of the fifteen constituent republics of the USSR became independent, sovereign states, something many of them, including Ukraine, had never been before. The world community quickly recognized these new nations. So did the new sovereign state of Russia. The Crimea became part of the sovereign nation of Ukraine, though the Crimean city of Sevastopol remained the home port of the Russian Black Sea fleet, something it had been for a long time before 1991.

In 2014 Russian forces invaded Crimea. Shortly thereafter the Russians conducted a popular referendum on whether Crimea should be part of Russia or part of Ukraine. That vote surely was for appearance only, but then Russian elections, including Soviet elections, usually have been only for show, Russia lacking anything like a democratic tradition. Many of the people of Crimea are Russians not Ukrainians, and, according to the Russians, the people voted to become part of Russia. Russia then annexed Crimea to the Russian state. Most of the world’s nations, including the United States, railed against the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea and have refused to recognize it. They railed against it because they had recognized Ukraine as a sovereign nation, a fact which did make the Russian invasion a violation of international law. They seem to have done so with little or no consideration of the historical context in which that invasion and annexation had taken place.

That historical context is long and complex. A state that could be recognized as Russian appeared first in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine. Russia became Orthodox Christian in 988 when the Grand Prince of Kiev converted to that faith. This first Russian state is known as Kievan Rus’, Rus’ being of course the source of the word Russia (Rossiya in Russian). In the thirteenth century the Mongols from much farther east in Asia invaded and destroyed Kievan Rus’. The political center of the Russian lands then moved north, where Moscow eventually became the dominate power and creator of a new Russian state. From a small amount of land around Moscow, the Russians gradually expanded their power in all directions, though at first much to the south because that’s where the Mongols were. Moscow acted at first as the Mongol’s collection agent for tribute, but by the sixteenth century Moscow had defeated the Mongols militarily. After Byzantium fell to the Turks in the mid-fifteenth century the Grand Dukes of Moscow began to call themselves “tsar’,” a Slavic rendering of the Latin word Caesar.[2]

Russian expansion continued, but Ukraine eventually came under the control of the Ottoman Turks ruling from Istanbul. By 1793, however, Russia, under Catherine the Great (who was a German not a Russian, but never mind), had annexed much of the land we now call Ukraine. The geographic relationship of Ukraine to the Russian Empire explains the name Ukraine. It comes from the Russian and means “on the border,” which Ukraine was to the Russians at the time. To this point the Ukrainians had never had an independent state of their own, though of course Kievan Rus’ had existed in territory that eventually became Ukraine. The lands we now call Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire with no distinction being made between Russians and Ukrainians. In the nineteenth century Ukrainian nationalism arose, but the imperial government of Russia never recognized the Ukrainians as a political entity of any sort. Neither did it consider Ukrainian to be a distinct language in its own right. The Russians mostly thought of Ukrainian as only a dialect of Russian.[3] The Russians never allowed schools to use Ukrainian as their language of instruction. Ukraine went from being just a part of the Russian Empire to being a Soviet Socialist Republic, to being an independent nation when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Most of us consider the collapse of the Soviet Union with its Communist government to be a very good thing. Soviet Communism was oppressive, totalitarian actually. By the 1970s it wasn’t nearly as brutal as it had been under Stalin (died 1953). Yet it wasn’t anything we or some Soviet people themselves considered to be good. In 1976 a journalism student at Moscow State University told me that journalists were allowed to write only about what was good but everything they saw was bad. Yet many Russians do not consider the disintegration of the USSR to have been a good thing. Vladimir Putin has called the end of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.” One wonders if he had forgotten about World War II, in which the Soviets lost something like twenty million people, but never mind. It was as the dominant part of the USSR that Russia became a world power that other nations had to take seriously. As part of the USSR Russia ruled over most of what had been the Russian Empire.[4] It was the USSR not the western allies who were most responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany. The USSR launched the first earth satellite and put the first person in space, accomplishments of which the Russians were and are appropriately proud. The Russian state that has existed since the end of the Soviet Union is very significantly smaller than Russia had been for the last two hundred years or so before 1991. Putin and many Russians regret Russia’s loss of size and stature since the end of the USSR.

Once they were free from Soviet Communism either as independent nations or as members of the Warsaw Pact, the eastern, Soviet version of NATO, many nations Russia had previously dominated, together with NATO did something profoundly unsettling to many Russians. Several of those nations applied for and were granted membership in NATO. Today the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are members of NATO as are the former Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the two countries that used to be one, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The former Warsaw Pace member the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) no longer exists and is part of NATO member the Federal Republic of Germany. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, but many of its people want it to become one or at least to see their country more aligned with NATO and the European Union than with Russia.

Consider for a moment if you will what the NATO membership of countries the Russians used to dominate looks like to the Russians. NATO was the Soviet Union’s great adversary during the Cold War. NATO was created specifically as a way to stop Soviet expansion into western Europe. The Soviet Union had had a string of buffer states, all members of the Russian dominated Warsaw Pact, between itself and NATO. Today the NATO members Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are on Russia’s border or on the border of Belarus, a former Soviet republic that is now independent but very much in Russia’s sphere of influence. The former buffer states of the Warsaw Pact are now members of NATO. Vladimir Putin considers NATO’s incorporation of those nations to be an act of aggression toward Russia and a vey real threat to Russia’s national security. I find it easy to understand why he does. Just think. How would the United States have reacted if during the Cold War Canada and Mexico had joined the Warsaw Pact? That is what has happened to post-Soviet Russia. Putin fears that NATO may some day admit Ukraine, something he could only interpret as another anti-Russia measure and a most threatening one at that.

So we need to understand Russia’s reaction to a couple of historical realities. Ukraine, which had been part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union since the late eighteenth century, is now an independent nation leaning toward the west. The Russians used to call much of what is now Ukraine “Little Russia.” For most of Russia’s history Russians have not considered Ukrainians to be Ukrainians but to be a slightly odd sort of Russians. Add the fact that Russia’s Cold War adversary NATO is at Russia’s doorstep, and you have a volatile situation at best.

I do not mean to suggest that Russia would be justified in launching a military invasion of Ukraine larger than the ones they have already launched, something Russia is quite capable of doing. I do mean to suggest that we absolutely must consider the current tension between Russia and Ukraine in its historical context. Putin is no saint to be sure, but he isn’t doing what he is doing with regard to Ukraine because he is evil. He is doing it because he is Russian. Putin is in many ways a relic of the Cold War. To him the west in general and NATO in particular have been the enemy or at least a primary adversary for a very long time. The United States and NATO have done nothing to assuage his historically understandable paranoia about the west. I find it reassuring that President Biden has said that though we would support Ukraine if Russia invaded we would not become involved militarily in defense of Ukraine. I do hope that more Americans and more of our leaders become more aware of the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine. We can’t possibly understand what’s happing between those two nations without knowing that history.

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[1] I used the term “republics” here cautiously. The constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were not republics in any meaningful way. They were parts of a totalitarian regime completely dominated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Russia. I call the former republics of the USSR republics only because that’s what the Soviets called them, Republic being part of their official names.

[2] When transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet in which Russian is written to the Latin alphabet the words Rus’ and tsar’ end in an apostrophe because in the Cyrillic they end with a character called a “soft sign,” which has no Latin equivalent.

[3] Today linguists and of course the Ukrainians themselves consider Ukrainian to be a distinct language different from Russian. The two languages are closely related, both of them being eastern Slavic languages.

[4] The only parts of the Russian Empire that were never again ruled by Russians were Finland and part of Poland.

On the Powers

 

On the Powers

December 22, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

There is a concept in the Bible that few Americans know of or understand. Perhaps you’ve heard or read some of the texts that use the concept. If so, you’ve probably just dismissed them because you didn’t understand them. If you have worked with them and come to understand them, God bless you. Still, most Americans haven’t done that. The concept I’m talking about is however a powerful one that is powerfully relevant in our contemporary context. It is the concept of “the Powers,” though sometimes we give them other names. Here’s a passage from Ephesians that expresses the concept using several different names for it: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12. I’m not quite sure what to make of the notion of there being spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places, but I’ll let that problem slide for now.

The leading American theologian who wrote on the Powers, the late Walter Wink, introduces the Powers this way (and I capitalize Powers because that’s what Wink does):

 

All of us deal with the Powers The Be. They staff our hospitals, run City Hall, sit around tables in corporate boardrooms, collect our taxes, and head our families. But the Powers That Be are more than just the people who run things. They are the systems themselves, the institutions and structures that weave society into an intricate fabric of power and relationships. These Powers surround us on every side. They are necessary. They are useful. We could do nothing without them….But the Powers are also the source of unmitigated evils.[1]

 

Wink also says that the Powers “include the spirituality at the core of…institutions and structures.”[2] Then he makes this telling statement: “[E]very business, corporation, school, denomination, bureaucracy, sports team—indeed social reality in all its forms—is a combination of both the visible the invisible, outer and inner, physical and spiritual.”[3]

Wink explains that the Powers can be and often are evil. He explains that reality by first positing that a Power is a created spiritual entity. God creates the Powers, and each of them has a vocation to be beneficial to life. Wink says that they become demonic when they cease to pursue that vocation. He has a saying that functions as a sort of mantra in his book: “The Powers are good, the Powers are fallen, the Powers can be redeemed.” He’s right about that of course. Perhaps an illustration from contemporary American life will help make the concept of the Powers more understandable. The example that follows is mine not Winks. It is the Power of American racism and white supremacy.

Racism and white supremacy are this country’s original sin. They have been at the core of Euro-American culture from the very beginning. Before 1865 the economy of a large portion of the nation depended on the forced, unpaid labor of enslaved Africans and African-Americans. That portion of the country seceded from the union and began the deadliest war in American history to defend slavery that the people of that part of the country feared the nation might abolish. After the Civil War the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution did abolish slavery, but it most certainly did not abolish American racism or American white supremacy. The former Confederate states adopted what came to be called Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation. White terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils enforced segregation and white supremacy through extra-legal means up to and including lynching. Whites in the north practiced racial segregation too. The difference there was that segregation in the north was de facto not de jure as it was in the south, but it was only slightly less effective in enforcing racial segregation and white supremacy than were the Jim Crow laws of the south if indeed it was less effective at all. American racism and white supremacy affected more than Black Americans. White Americans oppressed Native Americans, whom the whites often considered to be less than human or at least less than the whites were so badly that what white Americans did to Native populations amounted to genocide against Native Americans.

The civil rights movement demanding the end of Jim Crow and a real right to vote picked up speed after World War II, but whites in the south opposed it by illegal means up to and including murder. In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled that legally enforced racial segregation in schools and other public institutions was unconstitutional. The US government enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those measures have had some salutary effect, yet racism and white supremacy are still very much with us. Today however they mostly appear in a form that is harder to discern and to combat than was the legal segregation in the south and practices like redlining in the north. There still are Americans who are overt racist and white supremacists, but most white Americans today deny being racist. The law of the land prohibits racial discrimination everywhere in the country. Most if not all states have their own anti-discrimination laws alongside the federal statutes mentioned above.

Yet for all that racism and white supremacy are still with us. The difference between today’s racism and racism in the American past is that it appears primarily as institutional racism not the overt racism of individual people. Institutional racism shows up not in overt acts of discrimination but in the statistics from our nation’s institutions that show that racism continues to oppress American people who aren’t white. One place where institutional racism is apparent is the criminal law system.[4] The statistics from that system undeniably show that our courts impose more severe sentences on Black defendants than they do on white defendants for the same crime though few if any judges would admit to being racists. Unless they’ve read the research, judges today are probably mostly unaware that they treat Black and white defendants differently, but they do.

So what explains the persistence of institutional racism in the United States? Walter Wink answers that question for us. American racism is a Power in Wink’s sense of the word. It is a spirit, an invisible but real spiritual force that permeates virtually every American institution. This Power, like all Powers, was originally a constructive one. It’s mission was to bring people together in constructive ways and to create just social, political, legal, and economic systems. But like virtually every other Power among us this Power of social formation is fallen in Wink’s sense of that term. It has been corrupted, or it has corrupted itself. It is still a spiritual Power among us, but in its fallen state it functions to create unjust institutions and practices not just ones. It  has turned people against people. More specifically, it has caused white people to invent the artificial category we call race. It has caused white people to believe that they are superior in every way to people of color. It has become a spirit not of positive social organization but of the sinful notion called racism. Today the Power racism mostly though not entirely functions beneath the surface of life. It works within institutions like our criminal law system to produce unjust, disparate results tied to a person’s race. It influences people’s decisions and actions though the people through whom it does its demonic work are unaware, consciously at least, that the Power racism is at work in them and in the systems in which they are involved.

Winks says the Powers are fallen, using an image from the hoary Christian notion of original sin. But Wink also says that the Powers can be redeemed. They can be turned back to their original constructive purposes much like the Spirit of God can redeem a sinful woman or man—and that of course includes all of us. In this way Wink is even a bit hopeful though demonic Powers function in every aspect of our lives. The Powers can be redeemed, but saying that they can immediately raises the question of how they can be redeemed, of how we can return them to their original function in human life. Just how do we go about the sacred task of redeeming the Powers?

The answer to that question, it seems to me, is a combination of increased awareness of the dynamics of the Powers and a great deal of prayer. To continue with our example of American racism, most Americans believe that racism is only a personal issue. There is racism, people think, because many people are still racists. There are still racists of course, but, as I’ve already said here, institutions infested with the Power of racism produce racially disparate results though the people who work in those institutions have no intention of producing those unequal outcomes. The first necessary step in redeeming the Power racism is to make people aware that it is real and that it is at work in the institutions in which they participate and quite probably in their own spirits. Nearly everyone today denies being racist, but we have all been formed by a culture that is racist to the marrow of its bones. It always has been. Perhaps I’m projecting here, but I believe that most Americans who deny being racists are simply in denial. It is not possible to grow up in the United States without being influenced by racism. We take it in from our first breath to our last. We can’t avoid it. So we need not only to educate people about the Powers in institutions, we must convince people to do some serious self-analysis, and we must do that analysis ourselves. It is not necessarily sinful for an American to have racist thoughts and racists reactions to people. It is sinful to act on those thoughts and reactions, and it is sinful to deny being racist without have done a great deal of introspection and personal analysis. Most people today don’t want to be racists, and that desire makes us trick ourselves. We believe that a glib denial of being racist settles the matter. Wink’s theology of the Powers shows us that it doesn’t settle the matter at all. The Power of racism will never be redeemed as long as we keep denying its dominance in our institutions and its presence in our own souls.

The powers are spiritual entities albeit fallen ones. We must approach them as such, and we Christians have before us a teacher and a model for how to do it. That teacher and model is of course Jesus Christ. Before he was or did anything else, Jesus opposed the Powers. He opposed the domination system within which he lived, and he opposes the domination system in which we live. A domination system, Wink says, is the result of all of the demonic Powers working together to create systems of oppression and violence. Jesus teaches us first of all to be aware of the Powers and the systems they create, then to resist them through creative, assertive nonviolence. Opposing a Power of violence with violence just perpetuates the Power of violence. As Christians our unavoidable call is to speak out powerfully against the Powers, including of course the Power racism. We are called to resist demonic manifestations of the Powers constantly though always nonviolently.

It’s easy for me to say that that’s what we’re called to do. I know however that it’s a whole lot harder to do it than to say it. The Powers are strong, and they are firmly entrenched in every aspect of our lives. They do not yield easily. They resist resistance. It is impossible for anyone or at least for most of us to engage in resisting them without becoming exhausted and frustrated. It’s almost impossible for most of us not to become disillusioned. We may well even become jaded and cynical.

That’s where faith comes in. Our Christian faith doesn’t just call us nonviolently to resist the Powers. It is also a source of courage and renewal. It can be a refuge for us when the Powers have battered our spirits in our struggle against them. Part of our call is to pray without ceasing for the redemption of the Powers, but we can and should pray for more than that. We can pray to God for strength, courage, and hope when our spirits, strength, and courage are failing us and our hope has become very, very thin. Those who have devoted their lives to the struggle against the Powers know that we all need times of respite. We all need sabbath time. We all need sabbaticals from the struggle. Even Jesus tried at times to get away for some peace, solitude, and prayer. We all need to envelope our lives in prayer and openness to the renewal that God the Holy Spirit offer us every day of our lives.

The work of redeeming the Powers is holy work. It is work God does through us. We resist the spiritual Powers by constantly renewing our own spirits for the work. Resisting the Powers isn’t easy. It got Jesus crucified, and it has cost many saints of all spiritual traditions their lives as well. It’s not easy, but it is our call. With God’s help we can continue the sacred work of calling all of the fallen Powers in the world back to their original, sacred nature and work. May it be so.

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[1] Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium (Galilee Doubleday, New York, 1998, 1.

[2] Id., 4.

[3] Id.

[4] I used to be a lawyer. I know that our judicial institutions are about law not justice. There’s a famous story, perhaps apocryphal but nonetheless telling, about a crusty old law school professor who said to a first year law school class, “You came here because you want to do justice. This is a law school not a justice school! If you want to do justice, go to seminary.” That of course is what I and many other former lawyers have done.

Random Thoughts on Luke's Nativity Story

 

Random Thoughts on Luke’s Nativity Story

December 14, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

I recently went through Luke’s[1] story of Jesus’ birth to see if there was anything I wanted to say about. It turns out that I have a lot to say about it, some of it important, some of it not. I hope you’ll find these random thought at least interesting. You’ll find the story at Luke 2:1-20.

Let me make one point clear as we begin. I am talking here about Luke’s story, and I treat it not as history, not as biography, and not as divinely revealed factual truth. It is a story. It is much more faith confession than it is historical fact. It contains much symbolic truth. Whether it has any factual truth (which it probably doesn’t) doesn’t matter to me.

Right at the start the story includes two things that make no factual sense. First, there is no Roman record of the registration Luke mentions. One online source says Augustus took censuses in 28 BCE, 8 BCE, and 14 CE. Scholars think Jesus was born around 4 BCE, so none of these could be the one Luke had in mind. Quirinius, who the story says ordered the relevant registration, took a census in 6 CE. That’s too late. Jesus was already something like ten years old by that time. It seems, however, that Luke knew of this census and incorporated it into his story.

Second, the story having Joseph and Mary travel from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea to be registered makes no factual sense. If the Romans were going to take a census, they would want to know where people lived so they could be taxed or conscripted into the Roman army. Luke says Joseph and Mary went to “their own town” to be registered, but their own town in Luke’s nativity story (though not in Matthew’s) was Nazareth not Bethlehem. Also, at what point in a person’s lineage is the identity of “their town” established? Luke says they went to Bethlehem because Joseph was descended from King David. But of course David descended from his father Jesse and untold generations of people before Jesse. Did all of those people always live in Bethlehem? Almost certainly not. Why cut off Joseph’s descent at David? Rather clearly for symbolic reasons not factual ones. As a factual matter this part of the story makes no sense at all.

So why did Luke, who is the New Testament’s best storyteller, tell his story this way? You’ll find the answer to that question at Micah 5:2. There we read:

 

But you, of Bethlehem of Ephrathah,

      who are one of the little clans of Judah,

from you shall come forth for me

     one who is rule in Israel,

whose origin if from of old,

     from ancient days.

 

The early Christians read this verse as a prediction of a Messiah though the passage does not use that term. They believed Jesus to be the Messiah. To be the Messiah, they thought, he had to have come from Bethlehem. So Luke tells a story that has him born in Bethlehem. (So does Matthew, although Matthew’s nativity story is very different from Luke’s.) Luke here is not giving us historical facts. His having Jesus born in Bethlehem though Jesus was from Nazareth was part of Luke’s confession of faith in Jesus as the Messiah. As is true of nearly everything in the New Testament we have here not history but faith confession.

Luke calls Jesus Mary’s “firstborn son.” Luke 2:7. The Roman Catholic Church insists that Jesus did not have siblings because it insists on Mary being “ever virgin.” Luke calling Jesus Mary’s firstborn son tells us that Luke did not consider Mary to be ever virgin. She could be ever virgin if Jesus were her only child; but if that’s what Luke thought, wouldn’t he have said “her only child” rather than “her firstborn son?” Also see Mark 6:3, Matthew 13:55, John 7:3, and 1 Corinthians 9:5 for references to Jesus’ siblings, some of whom these texts name. Luke calling Jesus Mary’s firstborn son is a problem only if you insist that Jesus had no siblings because Mary was ever virgin. Because there is no biblical basis for that assertion, Protestants do not accept it.

Luke says Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem to be registered, but he never tells of them actually ever being registered. That omission suggests to me that Luke knew he was using the registration only as a plot device to get Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. Once they were there Luke seems to have forgotten or no longer cared about the registration.

Luke then gives us shepherds, who he says were keeping watch over their flock by night. David was of course a shepherd from Bethlehem, though I think the main point Luke is making with his shepherds comes from the fact that shepherds were the lowest of the low in Jewish society, yet they were the ones to whom the announcement of the birth of the Messiah was first made. Recall that in the Magnificat Luke has Mary say that God has lifted up the lowly. Luke 1:52. That’s what God is doing here, lifting up those most lowly.

Then, apparently suddenly, an angel of the Lord stands before the shepherds, and the glory of the Lord shines around them. In some Old Testament texts an angel of the Lord and the glory of the Lord mean that the Lord was actually present in person.[2] Luke was however Greek not Jewish, so he probably didn’t mean to say that somehow God appeared in person to the shepherds.

The first thing the angel says to the shepherds is what biblical angels typically first say to people to whom they have appeared: “Do not be afraid.” The text tells us that the shepherds were indeed afraid, and it’s not hard to understand why. We know because we’ve heard the story before that the angel meant the shepherds no harm. The shepherds didn’t know that at first, and what was happening before them was powerful and startingly different from anything they had ever seen before. I suspect all of us would be afraid or at least skeptical if we saw anything like what Luke says appeared to the shepherds.

The angel gives a reason why the shepherds should not be afraid. The angel says “for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people; to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” This part of Luke’s story raises many questions for me. What did these words mean to the shepherds? What did they understand the word Messiah to mean? Why was the birth of the Messiah good news of great joy for all people? We are talking here not about some mighty ruler buy about an impoverished, newborn baby. Jesus at this point has done nothing except probably poop, pee, and cry. He wouldn’t do anything of import for many years yet. As God’s Messiah he might do things of world-changing importance at some time in the future, but he certainly hadn’t done any of them yet. What did the shepherds understand the angel to mean by good news of great joy for all people? I suppose there’s no way to know. They didn’t get interviewed on CNN after all.

What could the shepherds possibly have thought about the Messiah lying in a manger? They probably thought that the Messiah would be a very earthly king like David had been. Kings are born in palaces not in stables. I get the symbolic importance of Jesus being born in a stable; but within the parameters of Luke’s story, what would the shepherds have thought of it? I can imagine some of them saying, well, what the angel said can’t be true because there’s no way the Messiah is going to be born in a stable. I wonder if some of them refused to go. And who stayed behind to tend the sheep?

Then all of a sudden there appears to the shepherds a heavenly army. Most English translations use the word “host” rather than army, but the word means army. The NRSV has a translators note that tells us that the Greek word being translated is the word for army. Luke says it was a heavenly army. I didn’t know that heaven had an army, and I can’t figure out why heaven would need one. Indeed, I believe that heaven wouldn’t have an army even if for some reason it needed one. Jesus taught us nonviolence as God’s way after all. If the shepherds were stunned by the appearance of one angel and the glory of God, they must have been completely overwhelmed by the appearance of a heavenly army. Maybe they got over it quickly enough. We’re told this army was praising God, which is hardly a belligerent or threatening thing to do.

Then there’s an issue about what the heavenly army said. Most of us know the King James Version translation here. That version has the army say, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” That’s how I remember hearing the line when I was young, and this wording has made it into some of our Christmas carols. Newer translations however translate the Greek here differently. The NRSV has “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.” It does have a translators note that says other ancient authorities read “peace, goodwill among people.” The New International Version, which is the most widely purchased English translation of the Bible, has “on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” It lacks the NRSV’s translators note about other ancient authorities. I personally prefer the KJV and the NRSV’s other ancient authorities translation, but it seems the scholarly opinion is that the original Greek limits the call for peace to those whom God favors. But who are they? Aren’t they everyone? If they are, then the change in the translation doesn’t make much of a change in the passage’s meaning.

The angels exit stage left, and the shepherds decide to go to Bethlehem, the city of David, “to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” OK, but what was there to see? A newborn infant, his mother (presumably not looking her best after having just given birth), and a man the shepherds surely would have taken to be the baby’s father. Surely baby Jesus looked no different from any other newborn baby. I doubt that there was anything special to see. When the shepherds get there they report what they’d been told, and all who heard it were amazed. Who heard it? We haven’t been told there was anyone else there but the baby, Mary, Joseph and the shepherds.

Luke then says, “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” OK, but what does “ponder” mean? Google.com says it means “think about (something) carefully, especially before making a decision or reaching a conclusion.” Other online dictionaries have similar definitions. I don’t know that Mary had any decisions to make at this point other than those all first-time parents make about caring for their child. Her big decision came when she said yes to Gabriel in Chapter 1 of Luke. Maybe she was reaching the decision that what Gabriel had told her was true, but surely she never doubted that it was. I like the mood of this phrase, but it doesn’t hold up under much scrutiny.

So there you have a few random thoughts on Luke’s nativity story. Despite how easy it is to deny its factuality and how many questions it raises, it is magnificent storytelling and confession of faith in Jesus as the Messiah. It is one of the most beautiful and powerful passages in all of scripture. I love it, and I love hearing it every year at Christmas time. I hope you do too.

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[1] We do not know who wrote the Gospel we call Luke. The name Luke was tacked onto this Gospel a significant amount of time after this Gospel was written. I should perhaps therefore say “the author of the Gospel of Luke” rather than just Luke, but to avoid using that clumsy phrase I’ll just call the author Luke. My doing so does not mean that I think someone named Luke wrote this Gospel. I don’t.

[2] The references to the Lord there are references to the Hebrew God Yahweh. The reference to the Lord in Luke apparently refers to God not to Yahweh.