Spirituality Column #424
December 30, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

"The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which is lost," Luke 19:10

Jesus arrived in time, space and humanity with a clear mission.  He came as fulfillment, truth, light, goodness, salvation and the only way to God.  He’s also the ultimate answer to the ultimate question: What is the meaning of life?

Take a good look.  HE is.

Jesus Christ, life’s author, presents humanity with the perfect answer in a complete package.  Jesus isn’t just an idea to make us go to church.  He’s not a myth to make us behave. He’s certainly not merely a “teacher” with good ideas and 2,000 years of mystically effective PR.  He’s the perfect image of God because He is God, in whose image man was created in freedom and love.

As we privately diddle with New Year’s resolutions aimed at fixing some small corner of our human experience (lose a few pounds, drop a bad habit, pick up a good book, etc.), there is a better, great big way forward into the New Year found in accepting and reaffirming our adoption in and relationship with Christ.

Don’t imagine it’s divinely glorifying to divide the enormity of God’s grace into bite-sized bits of self-improvement.  Don’t buy into the backwards, omnipresent, secular message that happiness is found within, and Jesus is something we can do without.  Jesus is the human example of what glorifies God.

We forget that our goal is to be human because we ourselves are so busy trying to be God.  We conclude Jesus isn’t God because He doesn’t always do what we want.  There is great competition for temporal glory among fallen mankind’s appetites and insecurities.  We know there is something bigger out there, and culture relentlessly suggests it is us.  No, it’s bigger than that.

In Christ I can endeavor to be fully human, because Jesus is fully human.  He’s also fully perfect because He is fully God.  I’ll fall short of perfection in this life because I’m a lost sinner, weakened by the vagaries of this fallen world and beset on all sides by a cultural message that holds secularism – faith’s opposite – to be profanely, mundanely and inanely “sacred.”  Large swaths of society consider sincere Christian sacredness – which is actually, truly and exclusively the province of the holiness, glory and love of God – to be naïve nonsense.

That’s backwards.  God’s sacredness is as real as secularism’s hollowness.  His glory is immensely and exactly the reverse of mankind’s fallenness.

In Christ, in humanity, in the New Year, go forward.

That’s our mission.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that respect for the individual resides in the humanity of Jesus, not the mechanisms of society.  Jesus seeks and saves.

Spirituality Column #423
December 23, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column #422
December 16, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

“And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid.” – Luke 2:9 (King James Version)

This familiar passage from the Christmas story in Luke 2 describes an angel appearing to shepherds the night Jesus was born.

Where our modern, sentimental Christmas observance imbued with today’s lightness and irreverence of commerce and non-religious pop culture mostly overwrites the infinite gravitas and universal significance of the incarnation of God, these shepherds were “terrified.”

That’s what “sore afraid” means.

Note closely that the shepherds’ reaction to the angel was not one of warm sentimentality, but of awestruck solemnity.  As the angel bade them “fear not” and announced the “good tidings of great joy” that “Christ the Lord” had been born, and “the heavenly host” suddenly showed up and praised the newborn king, these lowly shepherds immediately grasped the truth – with confidence and obedience – of what they had been told.  They didn’t doubt, or argue, or recoil in sustained terror.

They went “in haste” to see the baby Jesus, and then told “everyone what they had seen.”

The biggest event in the history of man – God becomes human to save us from our fallenness and reinstate our place in God’s eternal Kingdom – is announced at night on a remote hillside to a bunch of illiterate shepherds.  Of all the presumably more logical forums, venues and hierarchies where a divine declaration of this magnitude might be pronounced, it was to obscure, humble shepherds that the humble arrival of God’s son was made known.

The appearance of the “glory of the Lord” – whatever that actually looks like – evidently is what terrified the shepherds.  As the contemporary song lyric goes, “I can only imagine.”  But it’s instructive to note that the news of Jesus’ birth gave the shepherds comfort, curiosity, wonder and the confidence to go seek the Lord “in haste.”

With the news of the baby Jesus, the shepherds were told, essentially, of what we know today as Christmas.  Gospel writer Luke’s description is the only place in scripture that we see a celebration of the birth of Jesus: when the heavenly host – a multitude of angels – sings “Glory to God in the highest.”

We’ve made Christmas into a modern festival of sentimentality.  It’s nice.  We gather with family and friends.  We revel in our memories and traditions.  We exchange gifts and, hopefully, experience an extraordinary peace that mysteriously, wonderfully, permeates the season.  Much too often, we don’t know why.

Maybe it’s because the Bible doesn’t prescribe sentimentality.  It teaches us – implores us – to confidently seek Jesus Christ.  That’s the real lesson of Christmas.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is a lifelong sentimental sap.

Spirituality Column #421
December 9, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

It’s pretty normal to ask someone, “What did you get for Christmas?”

It’s pretty not-normal to ask, “What did you give for Christmas?”

Which question reveals the truer spirit of Christ?  Which reveals the more accurate manifestation of modern Yuletide, um, observance?

Yes, I know, easy questions.  Everybody knows Christmas is about giving.  Even the most politically intransigent civic-religious separationists probably buy a gift for someone, or charitably give of their time or treasure in the spirit of the season.  This cultural and commercial “Winter Break” spectacle that Shall Not Be Named in public schools or courthouses – convoluted mess of intentions and theology that it is – brings out the giving nature God most assuredly put in our hearts.  All our hearts, I think.

Contrast that with the gaudy and seeming dehumanizing tribulation of commando shopping forays on Thanksgiving Evening or Black Friday or whenever prices are low, crowds are thick, desired objects are in limited supply and the Christmas clock is ticking toward zero-hour when Santa’s bounty is presented to anticipating recipients.  We’re even willing to fight to give the best gifts.

Still, isn’t it odd that in this “season of giving,” for some reason, what we “get” is fair public information, but what we give is reverentially and almost universally respected as one’s own private affair?  A boast about a gift we received is OK.  Boasts about gifts we give are unseemly and coarse.

There is a theological lesson about the incarnation of Jesus Christ in all this talk of giving and getting, and a practical application, too.

Christmas is a celebration of God’s great gift to mankind: the humanity of His son Jesus.  It is in Jesus, the only perfect human, that we find our true humanity.  That’s important because God created humanity in His own image; we fell from that image in sin but in Jesus never truly fell from His grace or His love.  Jesus Christ, incarnate son, the Light of the World, came with a message: in My humanity your sins are forgiven, your humanity is restored, and you are adopted into the Kingdom of heaven.

Our faith in that message saves us from eternal death; it is the only thing that does.  No gift we can give, outside of selflessly loving others, comes close to measuring up to God restoring our humanity through the human person of Jesus Christ.

Salvation is very, very personal, as personal as it gets, because Jesus is right there between you and God.  You can get salvation, but you can’t give it.

But if you get it, believe it.  And don’t keep it a secret.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) opines that “happy” is about getting, but “joy” is about giving.

Spirituality Column #420
December 2, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville- Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

In October 1963 singer Andy Williams released his first Christmas album which included the newly-written but soon-to-be holiday standard, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

A breezy tune with a light-hearted and happy lyric, the familiar carol wonderfully transmits the fun, emotion and tradition of family and community Christmas celebration.  Why do we go back home for Christmas?  Because “it’s the hap-happiest season of all.”

And oh, how humanity – especially American humanity – pursues happiness.  Whatever else we want, we want it to bring us happiness, the pursuit of which is right there in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitutional DNA.  As busily as the modern PC crowd works to kick “Christmas” off the calendar and Christ out of the classroom, nobody is going to assault the American pursuit of happiness.

And that’s why I think Americans are especially un-European (Thank God!) in our stubborn non-acquiescence to the politics of “Don’t Say Jesus or Christ or Christmas.”  As noisily as some cry “separation of church and state,” and as grating as it is to hear the awkwardly forced, carefully inclusive and politically correct greeting, “Happy Holidays,” I think Christmas is here to stay.

Why?  Because I don’t think a generic Winter Holiday or “Winterval” (shorthand for “Winter Festival,” or possibly the winter “Interval” between academic semesters) will ever make us as happy as Christmas; there is no reason for it to.  What’s the big deal with a festival in winter?  There’s not.  The only big deal and happiness is for a tradition that means something.  And that tradition, that truth, is the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Pagan’s of old – way old – celebrated the lengthening of days right after the winter solstice which occurs December 20-23.  The gods had been robbing light from the day, and were suddenly returning that light to the earth, etc.  The ancient Roman holiday “Saturnalia” in late December was just such a celebration.

The birth of Jesus likely occurred not on December 25 but earlier in the fall, when harvests were in and taxes were collected (see Luke 2).  The eventual Christian celebration of God’s son incarnate in humanity, this Light of the World reconnecting our misdirected pathway of sin into the perfect light, love, grace and salvation of Jesus Christ, overwrote pagan superstitions with Godly, miraculous, and biblical truth and supplanted Saturnalia with Christmas.

O happy day!  Christ came and freed our souls.

It’s not just the most wonderful time of the year; it’s the singularly most outstanding event in all human history.  Merry Christmas.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) looked into it and learned the “scary ghost stories” lyric in this carol refers to an old Victorian Christmas tradition – think Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”