The Fullness of Time

 

"in the fullness of time, Christ was born" —Galatians 4:4

2020 has certainly been a turbulent year. A disorienting year. The year of COVID. A year when the conflicts that have been festering in American society rose to the surface. A year when the scabs covering racial wounds were torn off to reveal the open sores that had never healed. A year when our health care system and its practitioners were strained to the breaking point. A year when so many have died. A year of added economic hardship for the many who were barely surviving.  A year when increasing inequality made record profits for a few. 

A year when so many daily rituals and routines have been upended. A year when it has been difficult to define or even mark time as one day blurs into the next. Christ also arrived in a turbulent year; his birthplace was under occupation. Religious leaders conspired with rulers of the empire to maintain power over oppressed people. It would seem to have been the worst time to bring a child into the world. Yet it was the fullness of time, the completion of time, or better yet, the right time for Christ to be born.

How can a wrong time be the right time?

The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” —Luke 1:28-33

Mary was perplexed:

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” —Luke 1:34

For Mary, this was not the right time.  Yet it was.  The Romans had brought a system of roads, common language, and trade connecting Palestine and Judea with the rest of the known world. The Roman Empire encompassed a huge swath of land, from the Britannia to Persia and India. The reality of travel and communication that was inconceivable in ancient times was now possible. The world was ready for the gospel of Christ to spread.

Hannah Arendt called this time of possibility, this time of new life, natality.

“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, natural ruin is ultimately the fact of natality,...  It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope,... It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their "glad tidings": "A child has been born unto us".—Hannah Arendt

Prior to the birth of Christ, the people had endured centuries of darkness and uncertainty. The Babylonians conquered the land and took the people into exile.  Persia conquered Babylon and sent the exiles home to rebuild Jerusalem. A moment of hope only to be crushed by another conquest, this time by Alexander. The Maccabees stood fast against the heirs of Alexander to ignite an insurgency against oppression, celebrated to this day as Hanukkah. Another moment of hope. And then the final crushing blow came when the Romans conquered the land. To generations of a people, barely clinging to hope, the times seemed darker than ever. Then, something happened, that Hannah Arendt expresses as “something so unexpectedly and unpredictably new that neither hope nor fear could have anticipated it... [which] set the stage for an entirely new world”. The birth of Christ was about to change the world.

Ironically, news of this pivotal event was not given to the leaders in the halls of power, but to the "essential workers" out in the fields:

“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Christ, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. ” —Luke 2:8-12

Thirty years later, Jesus would grow up and begin his ministry echoing the words of Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

This right time was “the year of the Lord’s favor.” But the right time is rarely a safe time. Proclaiming the right message at the right time almost got Jesus thrown off a cliff:

 “I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff.”

They were not angry with Jesus for proclaiming benefits of healing, freedom, and forgiveness of debt ("the year of the Lord's favor.") They were angry because Jesus touched their idol, their religious nationalism, when he suggested that Elijah was sent to people other than Israel. 

So what about our time? In many ways this is a dangerous time. A plague has overtaken our land. Many are in economic distress. Politics are more divisive than ever. Religious nationalism has reared its ugly head. The sense that this is a dark time is hard to miss. This is definitely a pivotal moment. Things could go either way. As Sikh activist and author Valarie Kaur asks, “Is this a darkness of the tomb or a darkness of the womb?” Is this dark time the transition to the birth of something new? It all depends on how we respond to questions of this moment. 

The fullness of time always culminates in a specific moment. A live birth or a stillbirth takes place. In this moment is juxtaposed the promise of new life along side the risk of death. In choosing to say "Yes" to this moment, new possibilities arise. Possibilities we had not considered before.

We don't get to choose when we encounter these moments. Life asks the question and offers its fulfilment as the answer. Will our response be born of preparedness? Mary had no idea what would be asked of her, no comprehension of the joy and heartbreak that awaited her, but she was prepared to answer. 

So the question is: is this our moment? And what question is life, in this moment, asking of us? Mary answered "Yes". What will our answer be?

All the Lonely People

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"It is not good for the man to be alone." - Genesis 2:18

We like to think of the holidays as happy times when we gather to celebrate friends and family. Yet, for too many, the holidays are salt in the gaping wounds of loss and loneliness. This is borne out in a brief survey of today's headlines: "America's Loneliness Epidemic", "UK Appoints a Minister for Loneliness", "Public Health Relevance of Social Isolation and Loneliness". We have a problem. What we are intuiting and what our lived experience tells us is being acknowledged by governments, healthcare providers, and business leaders. We are lonely. And it's costing us.

There are so many factors that have contributed to this epidemic: our mobility (our lack of roots in a community), drastically shortened career life cycles, relationships based on utility or proximity (usually career) that end when we change jobs or move. Transitioning through life stages: student, career, single, married, parent, empty-nester, widowed/divorced, retired, and care-giver. All these stages are the realities of modern life. Transitioning between these stages disconnects us from others at the same stage. Establishing human connection at each successive transition is more difficult than the one preceding it.

In addition to transience, we have to recognize that modernity is mechanistic, i.e process oriented. Modernity rejects the spiritual, the metaphysical, the deus ex machina, i.e. it rejects any notion of non-material causality. Ironically though, modernity does have a deity: utility.

"Utility is the god of modernity"

― Esther Lightcap Meek  

Utility is the unseen medium through which we move. Every material thing, every occasion, every relationship is measured against it. Utility is the progenitor of work. We work to sustain ourselves and to give our lives a purpose. And certainly, our employer pays us for a purpose. But both employee and employer relate to one another out of utility. Once that utility ceases, so does our value to an employer. At that point, our employment relationship ends. In the 21st century world of work, our workflow can be so automated that we rarely interact with other humans. We report to a digital supervisor as automated systems call us to a shift or track our movements.

This bent toward utility extends beyond employment. It determines how much we will invest into maintaining friendships and family ties over over extended distances and through challenging circumstances. Marriage and significant-other relationships are no guarantee against loneliness, though our culture and technology pushes us to "pair up". Too often, we just end up being alone in pairs.

Whether we live by ourselves or with a significant-other, we will inevitably lose people in our lives. That being the case, we should always be open to establishing new connections. But, alas, we don't. There are many factors that may inhibit our ability to connect, but I will focus on this one:

"A national culture that promotes polite restraint, and which actively fends off and forestalls the forming of relationships between strangers, is one that might as well be inviting loneliness on its population." - Chris Bourn 

The author of this quote is speaking specifically about English culture, but I would suspect nearly all English-speaking countries have inherited this reserve as a cultural attribute. Because "utility is the god of modernity", we call on this god to justify (excuse) our breaking this boundary of reserve to establish a connection but only because something is needed or something must be done. We have forgotten how to connect with people for no other reason than they are people!

Another obvious but neglected connection is with our neighbors. Although I know my neighbors fairly well, I still have to resist the temptation to go buy a tool or contract a service when I could simply ask my neighbor to help me. "Sorry to bother you" is not simply a cliché or a movie title, but is too often our default to connecting with others. We need to view our need for help as an opportunity, not a liability.

Befriend your neighbors. When we truly know them, we are more willing to work for the common good. - Fr Richard Rohr

When we are friends with our neighbors and there is some degree of mutual reliance, it breaks the cycle of isolation. When my neighbor needs some staple item, she will knock on our door. It's happened a few times. One day, she stopped me to apologize for always asking for something. I replied, "No worries, what are neighbors for?" We have a long way to go to change our mindset.

To deal with the consequences of loneliness, many seek out the services of therapists. In this day and age, therapists provide an invaluable service to help us deal with loneliness. However, not everyone can afford therapy. Not to criticize therapy, but have we not commodified what used to be simple friendship? Have we not redefined a basic human need into into a pathology requiring a clinical solution? Yet:

"Healing and well-being are fundamentally political not clinical."
- Dr Shawn Ginwright

What Dr Ginwright is saying is that healing and well-being take place in the presence of others. But it's not enough to be in the presence of others. We have all experienced that feeling of being alone in a crowd. We must be seen and recognized by other people and we must recognize them. We must be open to it. It must be mutual. For that to happen, a mutually safe space must exist. Someone has to take the initiative by asking the other person about themselves. If there is one universal truth, it's that everyone loves to talk about themselves.  That opens up a space. That space has a name: hospitality. To be hospitable is to have a spirit that welcomes others into one's presence. A hospitable spirit is also open to the invitation of others.

In a hospitable space, we may be able to go deeper in sharing and connecting to that which makes us most deeply human:

"I have found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. " - Carl Rogers

If we are able to connect at that deepest level, it would heal our deepest wound, loneliness, the scab of which is alienation. Alienation, that sense of disconnection and distrust of others, is the dry tinder that fuels the wildfires of divisive politics. Alienation is the root of what ails us in the West. It makes us good consumers, compliant laborers, fearful citizens, and an apathetic electorate.

In the end, we must choose to reach out. That requires courage, sparked by the hope of connection, the hope that we are not alone, and faith in a better future. Our willingness to enter the world  of others, to connect with people, is an echo of the Nativity, where God entered our world to connect with us.

The Kingdom of God is People

Those of us who are old enough will remember Charleston Heston's role in the dystopian sci-fi classic "Soylent Green". The movie was titled after a fictional nutritional substance that humanity depended on for survival. In the movie he plays an detective who investigates a murder. He follows the evidence to its end. When he realizes the truth, he belts out that iconic line, "Soylent Green is people!"

In many ways this movie was a product of its time. The era produced an entire genre of post-apocalyptic movies. Certainly they were all a  commentary on our fears and self-destructive tendencies. Perhaps even on consumerism's endpoint where we consume ourselves. Those would all be a topic for another blog. For now I want to focus on "people".

Throughout His ministry, Jesus tried to convey truths about the Kingdom of God to people. Think of all the metaphors Jesus used to describe "Kingdom of God". A treasure  hidden in a field. A pearl of great price. A mustard seed.

When he sent his disciples out, he instructed them to say "The Kingdom of God is Near". He never told them how to describe or define this kingdom. They were simply to announce it's nearness.

So what is the Kingdom of God? What was it that Jesus alluded to, told parables about, announced the presence of, but never directly defined? It was hidden in plain sight, right in front of everyone. The Kingdom of God is people! People following Jesus. It's that simple.

The Kingdom of God is people following Jesus. They adhere to his teachings. They follow his example. If Jesus said "love your neighbor", then they love their neighbors. If Jesus said be kind and hospitable to marginalized people ("the least of these"), then his followers are kind and hospitable. If Jesus said forgive enemies, then they forgive their enemies. If Jesus said "love one another as I have loved you", then his people, kingdom people, love one another.

The Kingdom of God is built with rejected and marginalized people,  the people no one else wants. Jesus' followers love them,  re-humanize them, and build a family out of them. That is how the Kingdom grows.

The only evidence of this Kingdom is the lives of its people. Their disposition and actions towards others. When people are re-humanized by Jesus,  have their dignity restored, when people feel like people in the presence of Jesus' followers, the Kingdom is near. Because The Kingdom of God is people!

Lost and Found

I am  an engineer who is a bit of a techno-geek. If there is one thing I hate is being lost. I like to know where I am and where I am going. So when I started using smart-phones, the map app was my favorite.  Not only could I see where I was, I could see the traffic ahead! This provided the opportunity to see problems in advance and detour around them. Knowledge is certainly power! However the information has to be correct.

Over time I began to notice that my map location was not following my true location. I also noticed that the exercise app was getting the paths and distances wrong. This was totally unacceptable.

I searched the internet to see if anyone else has had this problem. Indeed they did! It turns out that a GPS could have an accumulation of errors that might need to be cleared out. However, to do that required a GPS test app. So off to the app store I went.

I installed the GPS test app so I could clear out the errors. After  opening the app, I discovered a previously unseen world. It was fascinating. A live map showed the location of approximately 20 satellites orbiting overhead. At first the symbols were gray. One by one, the symbols changed to yellow, orange, and then green as the GPS locked on to them. When enough satellites locked, the GPS established a fix. I cleared the GPS and the location locks came much faster.

I have observed that life can be like that. Sometimes we get lost. Errors accumulate. Noise, stress, fatigue, grief, and difficulties of our journey all take their toll.  We lose our bearings. We can no longer see the "satellites" that guide us. I like to think of these "satellites" as clues to our location and direction in life. So what are these "satellites"?  Conventions. Manners. Ethics. History. Tribe. Religion. Our "spirit" or inner voice. Our conscience. Our upbringing. Our families. Consciously or subconsciously, we rely on these reference points for guidance.

Sometimes we don't know that we are lost. We have been running on auto-pilot for so long, we don't realize we have lost our way. However there may be hints. A short temper. Irritability. Depression. The need to "escape". The need for substances.

Not only do we need to know where we are, we need to know where we are going. What is the destination? Status? Wealth? Fame? Leisure?  Family life? Social life?

Once we have our destination in mind, we have to set priorities. What will it take to get there?  Is it worth the cost? Life tends to be a zero-sum endeavor. What things will we have to give up to get the things we desire? We cannot have it all.

Just like the GPS, we might have to do a reset, clear out the corrupt data, and re-establish the lock. We might need to simply rest. Take care of ourselves. We might need a spiritual retreat. We might need to work on our important relationships. We might avail ourselves of the wise counsel of friends and community. The point is that our internal guidance system has a limit. It needs to be cared for.

In the end I was able to reset my GPS and get pretty decent location locks. Then I dropped the phone and cracked the glass. No reset helps that, so I upgraded. Wow! The new phone locked instantly even if it caught a sliver of sky! In my office building however, was metal coated glass that completely block thermal and electromagnetic radiation. Inside this building, there is no GPS. There are times when you have to step outside to see to where you are.

Around a Table

Recently I attended a church service for the first time in a year and a half. My wife and I were visiting another city and so we decided to visit a church we found on-line. Even though the church was small, no one seemed to notice our entrance, so we introduced ourselves to another couple. Service was beginning,  so we quickly took our seats...in the back.

The song service began. The theme  was love with readings from 1st John. Candles and subdued lighting gave it a spiritual "feel". Children were dismissed to children's church. A guest speaker spoke of a Haiti mission and exhorted people to get involved. There was an offering.  Then we were dismissed to have a nice week and go love one another.

Though I found myself resonating with the theology, I realized it was exactly like the church that I left and pretty much like all the churches I had ever attended. A passive congregation....in a box.

I came to see that churches are just another box that people can choose to occupy.... or choose to leave as so many are doing. As I thought about it, I envisioned congregants as hamsters running in wheels with clergy providing pellets of music, oratory, and activities. We are reduced to waiting on pellets. It's an environment that fosters continuing dependence and passivity.

Many things contribute to this environment of dependence.  The centuries-old clergy-led laity model. The physical arrangement itself: clergy on a platform/altar space, often elevated,  facing a congregation that is essentially an audience. By definition, an audience is a passive recipient. Since we face the same way, we don't truly see each other. We remain isolated, unknown, and disengaged. No wonder that people are leaving.

What if we changed the arangement? How would we relate if when we gathered, we faced each other? If we saw each other? Perhaps around a table? It would foster a new relationship, a new dynamic! The Spirit of Christ living in each of us listening, interacting, encouraging, and empowering each other!

That's how it was in the beginning with Jesus and his disciples. They sat around a table. That's how it must be again. The church must adopt a new form which is really its oldest form: a table. We must see each other again. In so doing we will see the Image of God residing in our brother or sister. Then we will be empowered to live out our life in Christ.