I can think of two particular stories to illustrate how I have been feeling this Christmastide. The first s the famous ending of the classic movie the graduate. Dustin Hoffman dramatically storms the church and steals his love, Anne Bancroft away form the altar where she was almost tragically married to some other dude. The two board a passing bus and the camera lingers on them…a little too long, just long enough for those of us watching the scene to realize that starry eyed feeling of them staring in each other eyes quickly becomes awkward and uncertain in hardly any time at all, in less time it takes for the scene ti finally, mercifully fade to black. The other time was when I made the highly emotional, thrilling and conflicted drive to my first day of university. So many days I had been anticipating the drive and the drive itself was both wonderful and terrifying.
When I finally pulled on to campus I remember parking my car, getting out and looking far off to the ocean horizon, and then turned and face the buildings and literally said to myself, “Now what?” To call these moments anti-climactic is somehow entirely wrong, they are both exactly climactic and exhilarating, but like all real human moments, they keep going. There are the few moments after every spectacular moment when we are returned to the hard churned out work of time and remember just how mundane each of our lives insist on being. Every Oscar winner eventually has to set Oscar down and use the bathroom. Every medal winning Olympian still awaits they have to take NyQuil to barely, and miserably sleep through the night to wake dehydrated exhausted, and cranky. And even the Holy family had the morning after. The shepherds looked at each other and said, “soooo, well, I guess we should be going…” and even the Holy family had the morning after. The shepherds looked at each other and said, “soooo, well, I guess we should be going…” and Mary with her eyelids half open said, “yeah thanks for stopping by to worship God-incarnate that just popped out of me, g’night, drive safe,” only to be awakened a few hours later by a cold and hungry baby Jesus who was not yet so keen on acting like the divine king we had been expecting… and, of course, there was the first diaper, when one half of Joseph’s mind was asking, “Is he ok? Is this poop normal? I should ask my mom,” and the other half was saying, “So you, mr poopy-butt, have come to save us. Alleluia. Alleluia.”
I like to repost blog entries from earlier years, not only because I like to revisit
think that is true. I still think our imaginations are dominated by someone else’s playbook. We are still speaking someone else’s language and hearing someone else’s song. That is all the more reason I feel the need to return to a conversation about grace before we go any further.
At least December 21st, the winter solstice, has some astronomical significance. But there is nothing about the sun, moon and stars that seem to put Christmas Eve, Dec 24th on the “Big Deal” calendar. Historically speaking, it was Emperor Julius that declared December 25th the celebration of Jesus’ birth, but actually the calendar itself has changed since then. In fact, in Russia, the orthodox church still celebrates Christmas on January 7th (which would be December 25th in Julian’s Calendar.) And even if you’re looking for the actual feast day for Saint Nicholas, the day when children used to put their shoes out in hopes of getting gifts, look to December 6th in western countries, not, “Christmas.”
Cynicism. In many ways it seems like the most logical, natural way to wrap up a year like 2016. There have been so many unexpected deaths: 
So here we are at the end of a year that has captured our imagination if by no other means than the fear and spectacle of it all. Not only have our thoughts and feelings been driven by the political circus of this year, so have some of our actions. It has demanded our attention, but now it is Advent. It is time to redirect our attention to where it belongs.
FaceBook is admittedly a strange land. Is it not? And it has been clear for quite some while that we don’t really know how to dwell there as our best human selves. Even so, in the past few weeks I have noticed something in myself and in others that has lead me to an admittedly bizarre but entirely sincere conclusion: I may be in need of an exorcism, and it is very probable you might need one too. 
Last night, again, I sat with a Christian friend who is struggling very deeply with his faith. In fact, what is more clear to me than it probably is to him is that he lives with a kind of anguish, a internal and unspoken resignation to believing he will never fully being a full member of the Body of Christ, but only, at best, as an exception God might endure if he tries hard enough. While this kind of conversation is particularly heartbreaking to me, it is anything but new. In fact, I have distinct memories of late night dorm room conversations more than 20 years ago around this very topic. So why are there so many loving, faithful people struggling to believe that God could possibly love them without putting an asterisk by their names in the Book of Life?
Every time I have tried to sit down and write a coherent reflection this week I have stalled and stammered. Not only are the events of the past several days complex and overwhelming, the endless grandstanding, commentary, and politicking is absolutely deafening. It is hard to wrap my brain around everything that is going on. Meanwhile, A 
like an eye-roll amateur, there is part of me that deeply wants to lash out and rant against this kind of histrionics. But honestly that too would fall of deaf ears or feed that culture war cacophony that tends to make us tune out everyone who doesn’t agree with what we already believe. So I instead I would like to suggest a less ranty, and slightly more Biblical perspective on the matter: Yes, we are being persecuted, and this is what you signed up for…