Treasures Emerging

How can it be, save by grace? Pure grace, and unalloyed! God's gifts emerging now in grandchildren like Jessica, Charlotte, and Matthew, captured in this Christmas Eve photo on their way to church in the late afternoon and a family celebration at our home that followed.

It was a Christmas celebration this year without little ones--quite different in character for that reason. Time around the table with Judy and Bob Stromberg, Mary and Bob Manning, and these three was festive--with food, of course, all the Christmas goodies, and inviting holiday decorations--but much more as well this time around. Animated conversations moved back and forth between us all, age differences no matter, in the sharing of life stories, memories, and dreams common to us all as family, yet unique to each of us as persons still emerging. What a feast!

Gifts followed, of course, somewhat simpler this year by common consent, and more quietly enjoyed, yet no less rich for all that. We were all wrapped up in more than giving and receiving gifts. We were embracing each other and the goodness of God to us all, and celebrating others in the family far away but close in stories being shared about them.

These remarkable grandchildren of ours--now young people--are African American, born in Sweden, citizens also of America, and integral parts of the Hawkinson tribe who happen to be Mannings. Each on their separate way to futures they have in mind, they all are tied nonetheless by family bonds that have secured and matured them beyond their years.

What a blessing they are in our lives--each a treasure given us by God--as all our grandchildren--"without money and without price." We are grateful for their spirit and life and excited to see them mature.

With Christmas now past and Epiphany upon us--that great season of lights--we pray for the wisdom and love of God to mirror the light he is constantly shedding abroad in our family to all the families of earth.

What Goes Around Comes Around

A friend at church surprised me recently with the gift of several books and publications from his library at home. Among them were two issues of The Covenant Home Altar, one of which, dating from 1976, carried a meditation of my own for this time of year. Based on Hebrews 2:14-16, it read as follows:

"The incredible wonder of the incarnation is that God's concern is not primarily for himself or his rights but for each of us. His will was to identify in Jesus Christ with us 'in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of his people.'

"If, understanding and accepting this, we might begin more effectively to reflect the same Spirit in our lives, no doubt others would come to know him too.

"Let us remember that as Christians. We are to be like our human brethren 'in every respect,' i.e., we are to experience with them and feel with them the terrible trauma of their lost and hopeless condition, understanding them in the light of God's love and concern even when they are not able to understand themselves.

Why can he help to the uttermost? Because he himself has suffered and been tempted. And because he never grows weary of seeking the lost he came to save.

"Dear Father, thank you for your identifying love. Help me, by your Spirit, to identify with others. Amen."

Thus do the words I wrote 34 years ago now return to address me. I thank God for their reminder that even as his Son laid aside his glory for me, he now calls me to lay aside my privileges for the sake of others.

Pretense and Reality

I was offended by the silly, tasteless, and often senseless ads that set the stage for a recent Monday night football game on TV. Glitz, glamor, and brazen power, mixed with not a little sexual innuendo--all meant to arouse excitement in us for what was soon to come--actually turned me completely off. What in the world is all this about? Where is it leading? If the media is the message, we're in real trouble.

Samuel Miller, a wise mentor in a former generation, speaks directly to the issue: Advertising has become the religious expression of ... secularity. If manufacturing is about producing more things, then things must be justified, given value, their glory (or glance--the name for superficial glory) revealed. The advertiser becomes the poet in our culture. In his imagination the product becomes the most desirable thing on earth, filled with extraordinary fascination, potent with a magic capable of transforming drabness and dullness to ecstatic heights of success. If such a gadget can be possessed by any means, by painful denials and endless installments, then all the harrowing frustration of being just one more human being lost in the anonymous mass is transcended (Samuel Miller, The Dilemma of Modern Belief, Harper, 1963, p. 9).

More and more, it seems, we as human beings are "lost in the anonymous mass." Rather than truly turning to God, whose image in us lies buried under layers of insecurity caused by our doubts, rebellions, and self-concerns, we become pawns for cynical horse-traders in idolatry that don't give a damn for our souls.

Wretched men and women that we are, who will deliver us finally from this bondage to sin? One thing is for sure. It will not be advertisers for this or that, even so-called religious ones. Our help must come from God himself, and the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not limit God's only begotten Son this Advent and Christmas to a manger where you can manage and take care of him--re-creating him in your image and the false images of our culture.

Behold him also crucified on a cross, then buried, only be be raised on the third day and ascended into heaven. See him even now sitting at the right hand of the Father, who has given him all authority in heaven and on earth to re-create you before he comes again to judge the quick and the dead, separating finally his sheep from every false pretender to his glory.

The Song Goes On

In his book Sing with Understanding (Covenant Press, 1966), James P. Davies writes that "when Martin Luther, under God, defied the exisitng ecclesiastical hierarchy and restored the belief in the universal priesthood of believers, he made available two great tools to insure the practice of this relationship: the Bible and the hymnal.

"He gave his countrymen the Bible in their own tongue," Davies writes, " that God might speak directly to them. He gave them the hymnal that they might answer directly. He said, 'Next to theology. I give the first and highest honor to music'" (pp. 1,2).

Many have said, in fact, that the hymnal is the instrument through which we form our theology in response to hearing the word of God. It belongs next to the Bible in our hearts and homes, addressing as it does not only the rhythms of sacred story in our communal worship year after year but the full range of our human experience as individuals as well.

If the Bible remains the norm--"the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct" as the Covenant Constitution puts it--the hymnal might well be thought of as our tutor, prompting us where and as we are to listen, pay attention, be encouraged, and above all be formed by receiving God's Word.

Yesterday we had two rich Advent and Christmas hymn sings during normal Sunday School hours at Salem. People were invited to choose what they wanted to sing and tell us why. The explanations were rich in both feeling and experience. But the hymns lifted up, bathed in biblical narrative, delivered once again to those gathered the substance of our faith.

There is no substitute for the "faith once delivered by the saints." Fresh joy flows into our hearts and minds every time we enter those streams--lasting joy and forming, the kind that, born of the Spirit, livens faith and increases our desire to spread the good news we have received to others.