Tag Archives: grace

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3 ways I’d fix the Church if I could

We left our church over a year ago, and we have a new church home we love, but I still often find myself heartbroken over the old one. I wanted to fix the church. I loved those people, I think they genuinely loved God and others, but we had to leave because they were missing three things—transparency, freedom, and grace. Without those, you can have a very nice religion, be pious and do good. But you will always have the danger of hypocrisy, legalism, and destruction, and you will never have the gospel of Christ.

Transparency/Hypocrisy

A church has to be honest about who they are. If you’re legalistic, OK: be legalistic. If, bottom line, a church holds that there are a set of inviolable rules, and the ultimate expectation is that you will agree with their definition of the rules and follow all of their rules, then put the rules on your website.

We saw this over and over again when we were church shopping last year, and I think it comes from a sincere place. Everyone knows Christian faith is not supposed to be about introducing division over trivial matters, and so they really want to be their best selves and put the important tenants of the faith out there as who they are. The danger, though, is when it crosses over from “aspiring toward our best nature” into “appearing as something we’re not”, which is very near to the type of hypocrisy that Christ condemned in the most scathing possible terms.

Better to just own our prejudices and be forthcoming about the ways we know we’re missing the mark.

Freedom/Legalism

I’ve written before about Christian freedom, which means freedom from Hebrew law. Not just parts of Hebrew law, scripture doesn’t support that. It’s all or nothing. And yet, our modern American Church often preaches the need for certain people to obey certain parts of the law, while we ourselves enjoy Christian freedom from those other parts of Hebrew law that would have affected us. This, again, Christ unequivocally condemned.

Legalism and freedom are opposites. If we must live under some law, we must live under all of it. I think most of us would prefer freedom. And if we assert that obeying law is essential to pleasing God, then we throw in our lot with the hypocritical religious leaders of Christ’s day, rather than with Christ himself.

Grace/Destruction

And yet in all of this— important though transparency and freedom are— it is the factual absence of grace that is the death knell of a church. Oh, churches know the word “grace”. Thousands of them even name themselves after it. But in today’s Church, many of us have lost the real import of the word.

How often have we heard it preached that grace means second chances? The notion that no one is too far gone? That we always have room for the return of a sinner who repents? Certainly it’s easy to imagine the opposite world, in which a one-time sinner is never welcomed back, however much they amend their ways. So the principle of second chances is real and good and correct.

But it’s not the same as grace.

Because if grace is only second chances, then Christ didn’t accomplish anything and notion of a “Christian grace” is meaningless. See, they had second chances already. Even the Pharisees had them. Christ’s words: “You teachers of the law and Pharisees… you travel over land and sea to win a single convert…” Who were those converts going to be, if not people who weren’t Pharisees already? “Just clean up your act, make some changes, start living like us…” That is the Pharisee notion of second chances: acceptance because you deserve it now. What Christ sacrificed to buy us is something different: acceptance in the knowledge that none of us “deserves it”.

This kind of grace only has one restriction:

  • Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?
  • This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.
  • Do not judge, or you too will be judged.
  • With the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Simple as that. Grace means, a way is open to God in spite of all shortcomings—ours, theirs, anyone’s— if we will only offer that chance to others too, as if our lives depended on it. Cleaning up your act is great, but it has nothing to do with grace. In tying the two together, many of today’s churches set a bushel basket over the true light of God’s transforming redemption, tying up burdens and placing obstacles, in a way that destroys others and themselves.

If I had to choose just one way to fix the Church today, it would be that.

The love and offensiveness in freedom

The love and offensiveness in freedom

Today, America celebrates our freedom, and rightly so: it’s worth celebrating. Yet on this day, we would do well to remember that freedom is more than speaking, assembling, worshiping, and bearing arms. It has a cost. It’s not a license. It’s offensive.

Freedom has a cost

Freedom is never free. When we think of the cost of our freedom, many of us think of those who have fought for it. My family lives in a community with a strong military presence, so the everyday price paid by those who defend our country is never far from our minds: families separated by thousands of miles; spouses and parents and siblings for whom gnawing dread is a permanent companion, scars both mental and physical that never fully heal.

Yet even so, many of us aren’t actually free, for there are other kinds of bondage than political. We are bound to past mistakes, to toxic relationships, to self-destructive behaviors, to addictions of every kind.

From these demons, too, there is a way to be free; there is also one who has paid the cost of that freedom:

Freedom isn’t license

True freedom is limited in all kinds of ways, from preventing infringement on the freedoms of others to the Janis Joplin lament that “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose“. Those who make the daily sacrifices of marriage and parenthood know only too well how freedom, voluntarily surrendered in love, can be to our good. The self-sacrifice of our freedoms in love is very near to the heart of the Christian message:

Freedom is offensive

People like to mind the way that other people live. Always have. We want other people to act and think as we do; disagreement can cause interpersonal friction, so in one sense, it can seem easier if everyone is the same. Yet if we do not want to be told how to live and what to think, we must grant others that same grace. Scripture bears it out:

As Christians, we must not be offended when others exercise the same freedoms we enjoy. We must not confuse our national freedoms in the Constitution with our God-given freedoms in love. 

When we say destructive words that damage others, we must not take refuge in “freedom of speech”.

When we advocate violence against our enemies in defiance of scripture, we must not take refuge in “the right to bear arms”.

When we become the oppressors who would deny the freedoms of others, we must not take refuge in “freedom of religion”.

In all things, we must be more like Christ. We are not acting in his name when we insist on our own rights. We would do much better to seek ways we can sacrifice for the good of others, and especially those who offend us most.

look of anger and fear

A humble alternative to anger and fear

It’s been a rough month. A friend recently reflected on it all by observing that she’s never had to rely so heavily on the “angry” and “sad” Facebook reactions. I haven’t been blogging much, because it’s been hard to know what to do with that anger and fear, other than talking about it all amongst ourselves on Facebook.

Let’s take Brock Turner. I’ve got nothing to add to that conversation. The stories that need to be told now are going to come from those whose voices have previously been silenced. I believe that the gospel message can have life-saving relevance to sexual victims. But I am not the one to offer it to them.

Or Pulse Nightclub. That was a hate crime against the marginalized… the very situation in which Christ’s words should be most relevant. But so many others have used my sacred texts to beat up those same people for so long, how can I now use them in the ways they were intended, for comfort and compassion and healing? It’s like the Billy Joel lyric, “If I only had the words to tell you, if you only knew how hard it is to say, when the simple lines have all been spoken, and the radio repeats them every day.”

I haven’t wanted to speak recently, because, if I’m being honest, it’s just easier not to. So many see the calm, gentle messages of the gospel as clueless: out-of-touch when confronted with actual pain or suffering (that, for example, is the entire plot of the hit musical “Book of Mormon“) as if Christ’s death and resurrection had included no taint of pain or suffering.

Loud voices today are shouting that given our reality, other than total disengagement, fear/anger is the only possible response. But that is a lie. Other engaged responses exist. Better ones. Ones that have power for good instead of evil.

Christ on trial was not afraid or angry, but silent. That doesn’t mean he didn’t understand what was happening.

Christ on the cross was certainly alone and in agony, but even then he chooses words— not of fear/anger— but of forgivenessreconciliationredemptiongrace.

If the Bible is wrong, if we were never made for other places than this, if the notion of heaven is mistaken, if the notion of God is mistaken, then by all means: be afraid if you like. It makes sense if this world is all there is.

But for those who agree with me that God is real, we cannot be the leading voices crying out for personal safety. Anyway we have no control over that, and meanwhile we have more important things to do.

However bad the neighborhood may get, however few we may become, however cold the love of most may grow, some of us at least will always be here crying out the gospel message: peace not anger, love not hate, good not evil.

I look around me, and I see the love burning quietly in so many hearts, and believe the promise of scripture: the light will always shine in the darkness, and the darkness will never overcome it.

50 dead

50 dead. Let’s keep being America.

I woke up this morning to the news— 50 dead, worst mass shooting in US history— and in my mind I could already hear the spittle-stained shouting to see who could respond in hate the most.

Gun advocates, gun opponents, the Muslims, the gays: All will be vengefully and vociferously hated by angry voices of popular and social media for days to come.

I wish my own quiet voice of peace could be louder.

There can be no question that this was a hate crime. How, then, can we possibly prevail if our only response is further hate? Martin Luther King Jr put it best: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

Even as Trump’s poll numbers will surge in the coming days, even as millions of peace-loving American Muslims will endure one more round of excoriation as the nation’s whipping boy, what I long for is a warm and gentle voice of reason to lead us through the madness.

That voice exists. But it is not shouting. It is saying, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” It is saying, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” It is saying, “Fear not.”

For all her faults, America has sometimes heard that voice before: when she wrote guarantees of basic rights unheard of in a day and age of autocratic monarchy, when she became a home for all of us former cast-offs yearning to breathe free, when she struggled to cast off her own inner demons of slavery and oppression.

In this historic moment, let us hear it too.

It has been said that the correct response to terrorism is militarismtorture, extermination. It has been said that we must think only of the extremists, that whether Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, or 9/11 terrorists, the peaceful majority are irrelevant.

My question, then, is this: when our nation of 300 million lashes out in anger against our enemies, sweeping the innocent into the mix, where will our peaceful majority be? Will we speak or be silent? Will we risk our own lives to stand up for the innocent, or be those left mumbling “orders are orders”?

When our collective wrath takes us down the only path that wrath has ever known, will our peaceful majority pass the test that so many others in history have failed? Or will we, once again, be irrelevant?

Fingers Crossed

Why I am a Christian hypocrite (Part 2)

Last week, I wrote about how I don’t live up to the standards of scripture. There’s a case to be made that this brands me as a Christian hypocrite, but in another sense it is not too surprising. Scripture itself even says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

But what about the standards I set for myself, aka “my rules“? If I can’t even live up to those, what kind of tension does that create in my life? And how can I focus on helping others if I can’t even help myself?

Rules

My coworker grew up outside the church, but in a community with a heavy, legalistic religious presence. He has a joke about his churchgoing friends from back home: “If I go fishing with them, I have to bring two. If I only bring one, he’ll drink all my beer.”

So many of us “religious” types seem to have rules that we follow when it’s for show but privately ignore, or behavior that openly contradicts our stated values. From Newt Gingrich to Josh Duggar, the revelations have become so unsurprising that, to many hearers, any position on morality sounds like hypocrisy the moment it leaves our mouths.

My life is no different. Those who know me know that I have struggled with unhealthy attitudes towards sex and relationships for much of my life. Yet the  energy (to put it kindly) and obsession (to put it less so) I invested had only led me down a path of grinding loneliness and depression, and so the idea that all of that didn’t have to be my raison d’être was a revelation and a big part of what initially attracted me to Christian faith.

Tension

In some ways, then, my Christian practice outwardly looks a lot like legalism. Take, let’s say, “adult media”. I’ve been damaged by dependence upon it, and one of my first acts as a Christian was to rid myself of it. Since then, you’ve seen me: I’m legalistic, flipping the Victoria’s Secret catalog face-down and closing my eyes during the nude scenes in movies. What you don’t see is: I’m only trying not to put that stuff in my brain any more. I don’t like where it leads me or how quickly it happens.

But it’s way easier to be true to all of that when I’m accountable, that is, when people are watching. Kinda sounds like, “when it’s for show”. Any recovering addict will tell you, it gets exponentially harder when we’re alone. Scripture anticipates this: we can help each other up, one person can sharpen another, we can spur each other on toward love and good deeds.

The salient points here are:

  • I’m not doing the “legalistic” things I do for show or to prove I’m “holier than thou”. I’m doing them for the sake of my life and my emotional health.
  • During those times when I have had a relapse, it’s always been “in secret”.  At those times, what I say & believe are diametrically opposite what I do, which is the textbook definition of hypocrisy.
Focus

This kind of hypocrisy is as old as Christianity itself, going back at least to the Apostle Paul:

I don’t understand my own behavior. What I want to do, I don’t do; instead, what I hate is I do… What a wretched man I am! (Romans 7:15-24)

So given all this, it’s a very valid question, again: does Christian faith still have any value? If the point of it all were to have rules and follow them, I might well feel that the answer was “No.” But that is the exact opposite of the point.

Before Christ, they had rules. If the point now was just to still have rules, then the coming of Christ was just a waste of a trip. Rather, says scripture, the point now is to set us free from all of those rules. And yet, Christ himself followed all the rules. What is going on here??

The answer is a matter of focus. Is my focus on me or on “them”?

To me, what keeps my admitted hypocrisy from negating my faith is, I’m not here to lecture you. I’m not here to tell you that God hates you because what you are doing is “sin”. I’m not even here to tell you that what’s destructive in your life is the same as in mine. It’s probably not.

I really don’t know what to tell you about the many folks in our society who want to stand up in the name of Christ and tell you different. The best I can offer you is, I’ll come gently alongside you and help with you burdens. I would love it if you would do the same for me. Let’s treat each other with kindness and help one another in the ordinary sense of the word. In this way, says scripture—hypocrisy or not, criticism or not, legalism or not— we are each doing everything that Christ requires.

Ideal Church

All I want in a church is…

My wife and I broke up with our church in January. We had been there for three years, and it’s not what you think. We have never been church “attenders”. We have never been the people who demand that we be served with a product that is to our liking, or we will take our business elsewhere. We invest.

This was our second church in the past ten years. During that time, my wife started a MOPS group and served for two years as its director. I did a yearlong pastoral ministries internship. We both started and led small groups.

Here’s the problem. You have to believe in your church.

You have to believe in the gospel that they preach.

For me, there are two “must haves” that I used to assume all churches had: room for the Holy Spirit, and grace for one another.

Room for the Holy Spirit

We live in a secular age, and through the power of human effort we have accomplished a lot. It is tempting to “do church” the same way. We make a plan, we set a budget, we track our progress, we achieve our goal! God’s kingdom is advanced.

Here is the problem. In none of this are we experiencing God. Some religions work fine that way, because they consist of a list of dos and don’ts, principles to observe, rules to follow. Some people treat Christianity as one of those religions. But it is not.

“I am the vine and you are the branches,” says Christ, “so long as you remain in me, and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing.” Christian faith is not a system, it is a relationship, a window into a larger world, and like Luke Skywalker vs. the training droid, you cannot connect to that larger world while remaining fully in control.

Grace for one another

All churches claim to have grace. Some even name themselves after it: a Google search for “grace church” comes back with over 100 million hits. It all sounds good, and you can go to those churches for a long time before you realize where the grace is limited.

Maybe grace is available to you…

To my mind, limited grace is no grace; it smacks strongly of loving only those who love you.

My dream

Last week at Starbucks, my wife and I ran into a dear old friend from two churches ago. We were delighted to see her, and all of us nearly made ourselves late catching up. Since we are “between churches” right now, we asked her where she is going. Turns out, she is also “between churches”, and I spent a few minutes sharing my vision of a Spirit-filled, grace-filled church. “I know, right?” she agreed, “I’m just not sure that a church like that exists anymore.”

Deep down in my heart, I believe it does. The word of God assures me that out there, somewhere, there are former pharisees and former “sinners” who have found true redemption. Somewhere there is a church of all of them.

Somewhere, meeting together, are those who have recognized their own imperfections too deeply to ever exclude others for languishing in imperfection; whose faith in their own power is limited by the memory of a time that only a power greater than themselves was able to restore them to sanity.

Somewhere on Earth, there is an echo of that great church, a multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language, praising God together.

I am praying to find that church. All I want in a church… is that.

pro-gun mom with son

Pro-gun mom shot. Where is our compassion?

This week, the news broke about a vocally pro-gun mom who was accidentally shot by her 4-year-old son. It is axiomatic that, in today’s American society, for the next two weeks, the Internet will be alive with horrible cruelty towards her (the worse because she survived). All I can think of is that hospital room somewhere, filled with those heartsick for the recovery of their mom, their wife, their daughter. 

Friday, her family publicly stated that the incident does nothing to change her stance on guns; I imagine that will be a source of much scathing derision as well. All I can do is remember bad things in my life that were partly or wholly my own fault, few of which occasioned a wholesale abandonment of my worldview.

Does my compassion means I am pro-gun myself? On the contrary. But if our sympathy’s reach is so short that it encompasses only our friends, then what good is it?

Compassion is not agreement

It happens that there is much about this woman I don’t agree with.

  • I don’t agree that owning a gun would make me safer. I’ve never had an experience where I wished guns were involved; I’ve had several where I was grateful they weren’t. But nothing about that prevents me from understanding the opposite perspective.  
  • I don’t agree with the tone of her past published remarks on Facebook. Some of them, to my ear, sound sneering, condescending, mocking. But nothing about that makes me want to abandon my core values and retaliate in kind.

I cannot help thinking, what if our situations were reversed?

Bad things happen

Something bad happened to her because of what she believes, but bad things can also happen to me because of what I believe. There are situations in which I could become the poster boy for those who want to mock the “stupidity” in failing to own a gun. In a worst case scenario, I could find myself powerless to protect innocent lives.

None of that, if it happened to me, would make me go out and buy a gun. Life is a gamble, and everyone still loses sometimes. I have educated myself as best I can, and of the various imperfect options, I have chosen one that I can live with. Pro-gun Christians argue that scripture permits self-defense, but at the very least, it runs wildly contrary to the example of Christ, which we are repeatedly urged to follow:

I would hope that, come the worst, people who disagree with me would understand that I lived my life as I did out of sincere conviction and accepted the consequences of my choices, just as Christ accepted the consequences of his and as, I’m sure, this mom accepts the consequences of hers.

No place for ungrace

People go skydiving and break a leg. People go swimming in the ocean and get stung by jellyfish. People cross streets and get hit by cars. We make choices every day and those choices sometimes go horribly wrong.

If we will not show compassion and grace in those moments, who are we? There is no part of your being at fault excuses me from my humanity. No good ever came of gloating or bullying. The Bible teaches, “Do unto others as you would have done to you.”

Which of us, in our darkest hour, beset by tragedy of our own making, would have others come around us in scathing condemnation and judgment? Be kind. Be loving. Be Christlike.

What Google says the Bible advocates

Correcting what the World thinks “the Bible advocates”

I’m depressed. Go to Google, type “Bible advocates”, and see the popular suggested searches that appear: “violence”… “killing non believers”… “slavery”. You can’t even get “love” to appear. Type an L to try and prompt it, and you won’t get anything. Google just sits there, confused, not suggesting anything. Same with F (for forgiveness) and J (for joy). P (for peace) just gives you “polygamy” and “death penalty”.

So today, I am fixing it. Some of that stuff is treated in the Bible, but none of it is what the Bible is about. Here is what it is about:

Google suggestionWhat the Bible is really about
A“abortion”, “child abuse” Abundant life, Atonement
B(no suggestions) Baptism, Begotten son
C“child abuse” Christ, Carry your cross
D“death penalty” Divinity
E(no suggestions) Eternity
F(no suggestions) Forgiveness, Freedom, Father
G“genocide” God, Grace
H (no suggestions) Holy Spirit
I“inc” Incarnation
J (no suggestions) Jesus
K“killing” King of kings
L (no suggestions) Love, Lord
M (no suggestions) Mercy, Messiah
N (no suggestions) All things new
O (no suggestions) Only begotten son
P“polygamy”, “death penalty” Peace, Prayer
Q (no suggestions) Quiet
R (no suggestions) Redemption
S“slavery”, “stoning”, “socialism” Salvation, Sacrifice, Son of God, Sabbath, Service, Freedom from sin, Defeat of Satan
T“the bible advocates slavery, violence, genocide” Trinity, Truth
U (no suggestions) Unity
V“violence” Virgin birth
W (no suggestions) Worship, Will of God
X (no suggestions) Example of Christ, Crucifixion
Y“yelp”, “yale” Pray
Z (no suggestions) Zion
Stressed & broke at Christmas

Overwhelmed & broke: 3 survival tips for this season of joy

My family and I love this time of year: the lights, the elf,  the movies and music and cold days, the time with family… Surprisingly for a blog about Jesus, most of my enjoyment at this time of year comes, not from “churchy stuff”, but from regular old beauty and joy and kindness, mixed in with a healthy dose of beloved traditions and just a dash of Christmas magic. The “Jesusiness” is more like Galadriel’s power in Lothlorien: you can see and feel it everywhere, but it’s right down deep where you can’t lay your hands on it.

We all know, though, that there’s a dark side to this favorite time of year as well. A friend’s recent Facebook posting captured it nicely:

So it is 10 pm and I just stopped helping with homework! My sink is full of dishes, I have no clean panties, I need to pay bills, I need to do xmas shopping, I need to wash my face, I need to check on the elf and I have spin class at 5:30…my Dad was at my house…I worked from 8 to 5….my husband is traveling for work AGAIN……blessed, life is good but this type of schedule does not make for a happy me… so if I seem short with you and need some alone time, let me have it!!

Is there anyone who can’t relate to that? All the ordinary stresses and pressures of life seem magnified at Christmas. As I thought about it, it occurred to me: it’s the application of that “deep Jesusiness” that gives me the ability to suck all the marrow out of the season without going crazy or going broke. Here are three specific tips for doing just that.

Financial Peace

Used to be, every year, my Christmas excitement was flavored with just an undercurrent of dread. So many expenses are non-optional, right? They’re traditions! Travel for the family Christmas party (including gifts for everyone there), having a roast for Christmas dinner, ice skating,  Disneyland! “Christmas costs what it costs.” I used to get a mental image, running my American Express card through that reader slot, that it would be on fire when it came out.

That doesn’t happen any more. We finally figured out how to stop overspending when we took Dave Ramsey’s “Financial Peace University” in 2013. It turns out you can say no to some of that stuff at Christmas.

  • Offer to stop exchanging gifts with adult siblings. The first year, my sister and brother-in-law wrapped up an empty box and labeled it, “The gift of nothing… for the man who has everything.” It was one of my favorite presents ever.
  • Start new, affordable traditions. Now we visit local light displays instead of Disneyland, and a local Christmas street parade instead of ice skating.
  • To limit spending: fear the credit card. We take cash out of the bank, separate it into envelopes, and when they run out, that’s it. Cash may seem risky, but the fact is we could misplace it all the first day and still lose less that we used to overspend every year.

A lot of the obligations we had to live up to, it turns out, were only in our minds at best, or were just ostentatious showing off at worst.

Take Sabbath

Two sisters were having Jesus over for dinner. Can you imagine getting the house clean enough for him?? One sister (Martha) was frantically running around doing all the work; the other one (Mary) blew it all off and just came in the living room to hang out. When Martha angrily demanded Mary come help, Jesus told her no, Mary’s the one doing it right.

That’s us at Christmas. The desire to be Instagram-perfect drives us to deplete our emotional reserves and then some. Just don’t. At work, when it’s time to be home with my loving family, I am rarely at a good stopping place. Those are what I call “lift your hands” days: just stop typing, push back your chair from the desk, and walk away. Not everything is done. It’s OK.

Sabbath is for us. It happens in the midst of our work, not after every possible task is finished. There is no work so important it can’t pause for the good of our souls, even harvesting before the frost or healing the sick… certainly decorating for Christmas.

Give Grace

It’s a cliché, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” Doubly so at Christmas. As we celebrate, a lot of people are heartsick for how it should have been, and they don’t wear signs. At a minimum this time of year, be willing to believe the best of the people God puts into your path, and be willing to love them in his name.

When we think of charity at Christmas, everyone knows about food for the hungry & coats for the needy, but what about a sincere smile and a heartfelt “thank you” for that harried grocery clerk? Or an extra $5 in the tip for that server, never mind that the cook burned your toast? What about asking that coworker, “How are you today?” and investing the 90 seconds to actually listen to the answer?

This Christmas, you may not need to house that pregnant couple who couldn’t get a room at the inn, but there are many simple acts of mercy that are just as important. In the end, that may be the most Jesus-y way to honor the season of all.

Christmas wishes with family

15 Christmas wishes for saving the world (especially #5)

This Christmas, I don’t want any stuff. What I want is our society to be a whole different way. Here are my Christmas wishes:

I wish we would judge one another based on others we get to know, not others we only hear about from people just like us.

I wish our leaders wouldn’t refer to themselves as “Christian” unless they want to learn about sacrificial love and follow the example of Christ.

I wish it wasn’t so hard to agree that our society is too violent, and that responding with more violence will not solve that.

I wish we weren’t so angry.

I wish that different people would sit down together in peace more often and talk; we might  realize that we are all the same.

I wish we could figure out health care.

I wish we would encourage one another to face our fears. Our easy, natural reaction is to separate from those we fear, but this only makes the fear grow.

I wish that Christians could overwhelmingly be known as the ones speaking the heart of Christ.

I wish we could all be calling out the need to shelter the poor and the destitute, that none of us were the ones walking past in the street with our heads down. (I was hungry and you fed me…)

I wish we were the champions of peace, lamenting the violence in our society, that none of us were the ones asserting the only solution is to kill them before they kill us. (All who draw the sword…)

I wish we could be the warm and gentle voice of love and healing to all, not the angry voice of condemnation over some but not others, as if God sees any difference. (All fall short of the glory of God…)

I wish we could be full of grace. (By the same measure you use…)

I wish that we could be emissaries of startling mercy toward people we’re supposed to hate. (Which of these was a neighbor to him…?)

I wish we, especially, would be known as those who love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

Hate is not going away. Misunderstanding is not going away. Prejudice is not going away. But all of those things are evils to be shunned, not blessings to be embraced. This time of year, we Christians celebrate a new hope, the birth of a savior, good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. What were the Christmas wishes of the angels that night? “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

That is my wish today for you, and for us all, as well.