Christmas Love and Logic

“The idea that God, if there is a force of logic and love in the universe, would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty…a child…I thought: Wow! Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. God incarnate. There it was. I was sitting there… tears streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of God picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.” [Bono: in conversation, NY: Riverhead Bks, 2005].

How many lives can you live?

Spoken-word poet Sarah Kay tells how when she was little she wanted to be a princess ballerina astronaut but soon learned she would never be all three.  We have only one life to live — however through the power of story Sarah asserts we can experience many different lives.  I heard someone recently ask, “Where are the poets today?”  Well, here is one and I think she is quite good.

Season of giving?

The holiday season is often refered to as the “season of giving.”  But is it? I’m not just talking about giving to ourselves, friends and families, gifts we most likely don’t need – but giving to those who are truly desperate, marginalized, forgotten, abused or hungry?

Sometimes our response to the idea of generosity is “I’d like to give but right now I [we] don’t have enough money or resources to spare and until we’re doing better financially – we can’t be expected to be generous to others – we just can’t do it.”

Yet as Christians, the Apostle Paul calls us to “carry each other’s burdens and in this way fulfill the law of Christ.”

The famous preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards responded to this mentality with the following comments….

“In many cases, we may, by the rules of the gospel, be obliged to give to others when we cannot do it without suffering ourselves…If our neighbor’s difficulties and necessities be much greater than our own, and we see that he is not like to be otherwise relieved, we should be willing to suffer with him, and to take part of his burden on ourselves; else how is that rule of bearing one another’s burdens fulfilled?

If we are never obliged to relieve others’ burdens, but when we can do it without burdening ourselves, then how do we bear our neighbor’s burdens, when we bear no burden at all?” [Jonathan Edwards, Christian Charity, The Works of Jonathan Edwards]

With this in mind, can we say this is truly the “season of giving” or “carrying other’s burdens?”