Top 10 Posts of 2013

Here are the ten Into the Expectation posts that received the most traffic in 2013:


1. Preoccupation with Material Things

 

2. Only what is Said Kindly is True

 

3. God is the interesting thing about religion

 

4. Refrain from Trampling the Sabbath

 

5. Getting Off the Fence: Reclaiming Self-control

 

6. N.T. Wright's Justification

 

7. A Summary of the Gospel

 

8. “Reading” St. Barnabas

 

9. Luther & Scripture as the swaddling-clothes

    and the manger in which Christ lies                  

 

10. Funny Jesus Songs for Bright Sunday

Binding, binding heart to heart!

Today is the twelfth and last day of this Christmas season.  But, that does not mean we must leave Christmas utterly behind. The one who was born on Christmas all those years ago is alive and comes to us every day binding heart to heart. And it remains true every day of the year that “where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.”

 

Christmas Meditation

 

He who by a mother's love

 Made the wandering world his own,

 Every year comes from above,

 Comes the parted to atone,

 Binding Earth to the Father's throne.

 Nay, thou comest every day!

 No, thou never didst depart!

 Never hour hast been away!

 Always with us, Lord, thou art,

 Binding, binding heart to heart!

 – George MacDonald

 

The good news will triumph!

For the eleventh day of Christmas, here is something from Brother Geoffrey Tristram, superior of the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE), an Episcopal religious community in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We are here to celebrate Good News – wonderful, joyful good news – not make-believe or wishful thinking.  The good news is this: that “the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (Jn 1:5)

Yes there is darkness – God knows there is darkness – darkness and all sorts of sinful, hurtful and shameful things in all of us, and in our society, our world.  But the good news is that when God looks closely at you he is not like the tabloid writer looking for scandal, for bad news.  When God looks at you, he looks at you with the eyes of love, just as when you look at the person you love, you see how lovely they are – all that is beautiful and good about them.

And when the person we love: our spouse, our children, our partner, our brother – when they are in trouble, or mess up, or fail and exam, or lose a job, or do something stupid and wrong, we don’t point the finger at them, or condemn them, or tell everyone about it, like the newspapers.  No, we love them even more, and we do everything in our power to help them because we love them.  And when things go wrong, we love them even more.

And when God looks at you and me, and sees how silly we often are, how we mess up, how easily we fall and sin: how we hurt each other, and ourselves, how we damage our beautiful world, our environment; when God looks at his beloved children in Iraq, Afghanistan, shooting and burning and blowing each other up, when he sees his beloved children in this country hurting and damaging and destroying each other, he doesn’t condemn them and say, “You human beings are bad news.  I wash my hands of you.”  No!  God loves us all the more.  God so loves us that he sends his only Son Jesus Christ into the world at Christmas.  But God didn’t send Jesus to us in order to look for the bad news about us.   St. John writes in his Gospel, chapter three:  “Indeed God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

God sent Jesus into the world at Christmas to share what it is to be human: to experience in his body the terrible, hurtful and sinful things that we can do to each other – and yet to carry on loving us, and forgiving us and redeeming us: restoring us to who we are meant to be.

And that is very good news.  However dark life can be, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.  However bad the bad news is, the good news is better, is stronger – the good news will triumph!

(Read it all here)

Recovering our true humanity

For the tenth day of Christmas, more from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“And in the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Henceforth, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all that bears a human form. Through fellowship and communion with the incarnate Lord, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time we are delivered from that individualism which is the consequence of sin, and retrieve our solidarity with the whole human race. By being partakers of Christ incarnate, we are partakers in the whole humanity which he bore. We now know that we have been taken up and borne in the humanity of Jesus, and therefore that new nature we now enjoy means that we too must bear the sins and sorrows of others. The incarnate Lord makes his followers the brothers of all mankind.”

― The Cost of Discipleship, Chapter 32

“The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man.”

― The Cost of Discipleship, Chapter 32

Here lies the only remedy

Something from Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the ninth day of Christmas:

“God sends his Son – here lies the only remedy. It is not enough to give man a new philosophy or better religion. A Man comes to men. Every man bears an image. His body and his life become visible. A man is not a bare word, a thought or a will. He is above all and always a man, a form, an image, a brother. And thus he does not create around him just a new way of thought, will and action but he gives us the new image, the new form. Now in Jesus Christ this is just what has happened. The image of God has entered our midst, in the form of our fallen life, in the likeness of sinful flesh. In the teaching and acts of Christ, in his life and death, the image of God is revealed. In him the divine image has been re-created here on earth. The Incarnation, the words and acts of Jesus, his death on the cross, all are indispensable parts of that image. But it is not the same image as Adam bore in the primal glory of paradise. Rather, it is the image of one who enters a world of sin and death, who takes upon himself all the sorrows of humanity, who meekly bears God’s wrath and judgment against sinners, and obeys his will with unswerving devotion in suffering and death, the Man born to poverty, the friend of publicans and sinners, the Man of sorrows, rejected of man and forsaken of God. Here is God made man, here is man in the new image of God.”

The Cost of Discipleship, Chapter 32

Honey, Music, and a Shout of Joy

The eighth day of Christmas is the Feast of the Holy Name. As Bernard of Clairvaux said,

“Jesus is honey in the mouth, music in the ear, and a shout of joy in the heart.”

Here is what the Bible says about the name:

She [Mary] will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

(Matthew 1:21)

 

And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

(Luke 2:21)

 

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

   who, though he was in the form of God,

   did not regard equality with God

   as something to be exploited,

   but emptied himself,

   taking the form of a slave,

   being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

   he humbled himself

   and became obedient to the point of death—

   even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him

   and gave him the name

   that is above every name,

   so that at the name of Jesus

   every knee should bend,

   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

   and every tongue should confess

   that Jesus Christ is Lord,

   to the glory of God the Father.

(Philippians 2:3-11)