Why Christmas?

What's it all about? From the songs, decorations, and ads, you'd think the holiday was all about family, food, and receiving a boatload of gifts. You'd think the important players were Santa (a.k.a. Saint Nick), Rudolph, Frosty, and a lot of elves.

You'd never guess that Christmas is one of the most important religious holidays in the entire history of the world.

Everything started when God created time and space, populating it with stars and planets and creatures. The high point of creation was making human beings, and Genesis tells us that God would walk with Adam and Eve every day - until that fateful day when they chose to distrust God's intentions and learn about good and evil.

God, who lives outside of space-time, chose to enter his creation and spend time with his creatures because he loved them. When they sinned, God, who cannot bear the presence of sin, gave up his daily walks with Adam and Eve. But he had a plan that would fix everything.

God would take on human flesh and live among us, first as a fetus within Mary's womb, later as a child, and finally as a teacher, redeemer, and lord. God, who once walked in Eden, spent 30 years inside creation as a creature. God, in the person of Jesus, rubbed shoulders with sinners, told them of God's love, condemned fakers, and never sinned. Through his life and death, he broke the power of sin (defined as doing what pleases us rather than what pleases God) and made it possible for humans throughout history to live in a right relationship with their Creator.

The purpose behind Christmas isn't receiving loot or spending time with family; it is recognizing the lengths to which a God who is love is willing to go to demonstrate that love to selfish people. Jesus came from heaven and took on human flesh with all the limitations of a baby - totally dependent on others to feed him, comfort him, and change his diapers. The God who made the cosmos emptied himself and became one of us to the point of accepting execution for a crime he didn't commit - all because he loves us and doesn't want our selfish pride to come between us.

The story of Christmas is the story of God invading history to liberate those held captive by sin. God offers us a gift of new life that nothing in the mall can hold a candle to. All we have to do is receive it.

Therein lies the rub. To receive this gift, we need to empty our hands of pride. We can know about the gift and see the gift and create wonderful theologies about the gift, but we cannot accept the gift until we make room for it. We cannot live in a right relationship with God as long as we place our desires ahead of God's.

We were created by a God who is love so that we could be loved, and we are loved whether we accept this gift or not.

We live in a broken, messed up world, and we have learned distrust from childhood. Because we are surrounded by sin and infused by selfisness, we live in fear of others and of God. We want what we want, and we'll do whatever is necessary to get it, taking it by force or subjecting ourselves to others so our needs will be met.

Despite millenia of legalistic religious teachings, God does not hate us and is not out to condemn us for breaking his rules. He loves and and wants us to love him. If we don't, then we have chosen hell.

There is nothing we can do to earn God's love. Following his rules perfectly won't earn us anything. God will never love us more or less regardless of what we do, but if we don't come to him - if we turn our backs on God, we have chosen our path.

God loves us and demonstrated that love in Jesus. He asks us one question: Do you trust me?

God calls us into the freedom of trusting his love and his plan for our lives. He promises that good will even come through the bad things that happen to those who love him. He asks us to put aside our agenda, spend time conversing with him, and live a life that reflects the love he has given us.

If you have learned to trust God, you have already received the most valuable present.

If you haven't yet chosen to trust God, know that God is love, that he knows and loves you no matter what choices you may have made, and that he wants to be in a relationship with you for the rest of your life.

God doesn't insist that we live perfectly to merit salvation - or that we live perfectly because we have received salvation. He calls us to live honestly, to own up to our mistakes, to reflect the grace he has shown us, and to know a deep and lasting peace that will keep us rooted every day.

Santa and Rudolph and Frosty and presents under the tree are nice things, but knowing the love and peace to be found in trusting God makes them pale in comparison. May you know the grace of God this holiday season!

The Matrix Has You

The Matrix is one of my favorite movies of all time. It may be 10 years old, and I may have watched it several dozen times, but every new viewing remains a treat. The special effects blew us away, but it's the depth of the story that keeps me coming back.

Theology?

The Matrix is one of those films that readily lends itself to philosophical and religious discussion. How do we know what is truly real? And doesn't Neo seem to be a Messiah figure?

I'm not going to argue about the Wachowski brothers' theology, which is imperfect. Of course, we have to admit the same is true of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Barth, and every other theologian who has ever lived. We see in a dim mirror, as the Apostle Paul put it.

The Matrix can really stretch your mind. It helps me challenge long held assumptions and reframe my thinking. It's stimulating.

Analogies

We're created beings, and we can't really grasp God, eternity, or just how God knows everything. I was a philosophy major in college, and these are heady concepts. We can glimpse parts of them, but never comprehend the whole. (As Augustine said, "If you believe that you have comprehended God, what you have comprehended is not God." God is too big, too other, too holy for mortal minds to fathom.)

I've found some analogies that help me understand creation, eternity, predestination, and human responsibility a bit more.

• Creation is like a book that God has written. He created a plot outline, fleshed it out, made edits and revisions, and when that was done, he spoke and it came to be. As some fiction writers know, some characters take on a life of their own a sometimes follow a path the author would just as soon avoid. (For example, read about Joshua in The Arm of the Starfish by Madeline L'Engle.) Just as human author lives outside the timeline of their stories, God exists outside the timeline of creation.
• Creation is like a play that God has written. He wrote the whole, gives each of us a role, and judges us on how we live our part. Do we trust the playwright, or do we actors believe that we understand the play better than its creator? Do we embrace the life that God planned for us and live it to his glory?
• Creation is like a movie that God has scripted, directed, and edited. When we view a movie, it's put together a certain way, even if the scenes were filmed in a different order. Some scenes end up on the cutting room floor. Some scenes are shot over and over again until everything works just right. The producer has a vision, and the only thing that counts is the end result, not the exact steps involved in creating the final cut.

These are imperfect analogies, but I find them helpful.

To top it all off, the Son of God became a character in the book, play, or movie. Somehow.

It's mind boggling.

'The Matrix Has You'

The Matrix gives me another set of analogies. We discover that what everyone believes is truly real is just a massive multiplayer virtual reality created by the machines. Everything works as we expect it to because the story masters/programmers make no allowances for anything else. Life is predictable and comprehensible. And when things go awry, they send in the Smiths, special programs designed to deal with the few who won't conform to the parameters of this virtual reality.

As many philosophers have asked, "How can I trust my perceptions?" In The Matrix, you can't, because the true reality is that human beings are functioning in a virtual world while their bodies are used to power the machines that enslave them through this simulation.
The key idea behind The Matrix is that there is a true reality behind perceived reality, and because it is truly real, those who can tap into that truth are able to bend or break the laws of the virtual reality. Neo can dodge bullets, move at inhuman speeds, and come back from the dead because he knows he has a real existence outside the simulation.

What we perceive is a construct designed to emulate what is real.

The Matrix Has Us

I'm a Boomer. I grew up and attended school in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a heady time. Science had given us computers, television, rockets, nuclear energy, and much more. We had grasped reality with the laws of science, and nothing would be beyond our grasp. We might inhabit space. We could play with the power of the atom. We could find a way to cure any disease. What we considered unimaginable wonders would become commonplace by the 21st Century. And science fiction became my favorite form of fiction.

Using the scientific method, we would eventually be able to understand and control everything. Beyond the physical world, we could analyze individuals and societies. Even theology - the study of God - became subject to the scientific method. Well, religion. In the end, the universe is comprehensible, and we have or will develop the tools to comprehend it.

The name of this matrix is materialism. Materialism holds that matter is the only thing that exists. There is no reality that cannot be counted, measured, and analyzed. We are the sum of our body chemistry and the electrical impulses coursing through our bodies. If spirits exist as some sort of residual energy after we die, we can detect them. And we can fix psychological problems with electricity, surgery, or chemistry.

By definition, Christians are not materialists. We believe that something exists outside the cosmos, outside the material world. The universe is a created thing, and while we may not be able to measure God, he exists. Not only that, but part of who we are is intended for eternity, for a life beyond the restrictions of this physical world.

That said, many Christians are functional materialists. We theoretically believe in a God not bound by the laws of nature, but we live as though the material world is all that is real. Heaven and the hereafter may be different, but here and now we live as though we are bound by physical reality - by the matrix.

Breaking Free

I have a really hard time believing - really, truly, honestly, completely believing - that what we understand to be the real world is really a construct, a virtual reality that we cannot distinguish from anything else. Yet if we take the Bible as truthful, we know that God intervenes and is not constrained by the laws of creation. Jesus turned water into wine, healed the sick, multiplied fish and bread, cast out demons, walked on water, and came back to life after he had died.

We read of healings in the Old Testament and the New. We see the walls of Jericho crumble. We hear the locks of a prison undone so Peter can walk out. And yet we have a hard time believing it could still happen, because we have been conditioned by the matrix of materialism. There are incurable diseases (at least at our level of scientific knowledge). There are circumstances that God cannot change. Whatever our theology, in practice we see God limited to acting within the laws of nature.

Nonsense. God has never been bound, not even when Jesus took on human flesh and lived among us. Like Neo in The Matrix, Jesus was able to tap into the reality behind perceived reality.

Cosmic Christ

In the very simplest terms, Jesus came to save us from sin, to break the barriers between us and God. But there's a lot more to it than that: Just as all of creation was subject to sin through the actions of Adam and Eve, all of creation is redeemed through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Apostle Paul saw this clearly while writing his letter to the church in Rome. Here are three translations of the relevant passage:

"Against its will, all creation was subjected to God's curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God's children in glorious freedom from death and decay." (Rom 8:20, 21, NLT)

"For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." (Rom. 8:20, 21, NIV)

"...all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe - people and things, animals and atoms - get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross." (Col. 1:20, The Message)

Paul comes back to this theme in Colossians, when he says,

"...through [Jesus] God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ's blood on the cross." (Col. 1:20, NLT)

There's a catch: Everything that Jesus accomplished through his death and resurrection has not yet been completed within creation. The last chapter has already been written. It is finished. However, we are living inside the story, and while we know how it will end, the brokenness of this world will not disappear until the new heaven and new earth are made at the end of this story.

Beyond Materialism

Albert Einstein changed our understanding of the universe when he figured out that matter and energy are flip sides of the famous equation E = mc². Energy can be "released" from matter, a truth that showed itself in the atom bomb and nuclear power plants. On the flip side, matter is a form of energy - minuscule subatomic packets clinging together, orbiting each other, and making up the physical world. (Let's not even bring up quantum mechanics, which seems so counterintuitive from a material perspective.)

Energy is matter. Matter is energy. The great I AM spoke, and light and matter and planets and creatures came into being. Out of nothing but his creative power, God invented the reality we live within.

The physical is not all there is. Energy is fundamental, and the laws of physics have some surprises, such as quantum mechanics. How can something be in this orbit or that orbit, move between them, yet never exist between them? It boggles my imagination.

No matter how deep our understanding of this, we live our day-to-day lives rooted in reality as we perceive it - naive pre-theoretical thought. In the pre-scientific world, everyday life included miracles - lightning, the cycle of day and night, spirits, powers, magic - things we couldn't explain but believed in. (Some people are such convinced materialists that they will only accept scientific explanations, such as Arthur C. Clarke's third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")

For those of us raised in the Western world, it's hard to break our bondage to materialism. Spirituality is a state of mind. Religious experiences can be measured. God, if he exists, set the universe in motion and no longer interferes. There is no magic. There are no miracles. All we can know (as defined by science) is material.

Real Knowing

Materialism is a matter of faith, of believing that for all intents and purposes there is nothing outside the cosmos. This is all there is.

Yet the scientific worldview is a modern development. For millennia, people have believed in gods and spirits and powers not bound by the usual laws of nature. In many cultures, that's still part of the worldview.

Even in the Western world, our naive pre-theoretical thought knows that matter is not all that is. We grasp concepts such as truth, trust, beauty, love, and hope - and their opposites. Even if science can measure changes in our brain chemistry and electrical fields, we know that there's more to these ideals than a brain state.

Although I can't scientifically prove it, I know that God exists, that he loves me, and that he is trustworthy. This is as real to me as the keyboard on which I type these words. And it's a truth so fundamental that my life would be meaningless if it were not true.

There is a God who planned and made the universe and knows every bit of it. There is a God who planned me, brought my parents together to bring me into the world in accordance with his plan, knows my every failure and selfish thought, and loves me just the same. The Son of God came to show the world this love and break the barrier of sin and selfishness between we rebellious humans and the God who planned and made us. The Holy Spirit touches our hearts to convict us of our selfishness and sin - and to reveal God's loving plan to tear down that wall and draw us to himself.

I know all that. I live because that is true. And yet I have a hard time letting God be God in the physical world. I have a struggle knowing that God can and will bend or shatter the rules of the physical world even though I have heard the stories from childhood, hear of new miracles every month, and have seen and experienced some.

Matter is energy. God transcends the laws of nature. God has touched my spirit and transformed my life. And still I struggle with unbelief in this area.

In Mark 9, we read the story of a man who brought his son to Jesus for release from an evil spirit. Like me, this father had a hard time really believing, and he confessed to Jesus, "I do believe, but help me not to doubt!" (Mark 9:24 NLT)

I know the physical world is not all there is, and I know the God behind our perceived reality, but the matrix still has me to a good extent. "Help me not to doubt!"

Redeemed and Remade

"The important thing that I learned is that for a Christian nothing is wasted in this life: no bad decision, no vocational change, no personal failure." - Keith Miller, Habitation of Dragons

I can't ask others to share their stories if I don't share mine. It's not an easy story. There was a lot of pain, but what counts is the end result.

I was baptized and grew up in a Christian home and in the church. My parents sent me to Christian schools. There was never any doubt that God existed or that he had created the universe. (I think our first memory verse in 1st grade was Genesis 1:1 - "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.") It was an objective fact.

We learned Bible stories alongside math, English, and history. It was objective truth: creation, fall, flood, Abraham's journeys, Joseph in Egypt, Moses vs. Pharaoh, the judges and kings of Israel, the birth and life and resurrection of Jesus, the stories of the early church.

The big thing was that God had handed down 10 Big Laws that we were supposed to live by. At the same time, the law declared us all sinners. As I understood it, your safest bet was to follow the rules as closely as possible in hopes of pleasing God, pretend that you followed them perfectly in hopes of not being judged by others, and hope that in the end you had more good points than bad ones so you'd get into heaven. That's what I thought as a child, and that's how I lived most of my life.

Jesus died for our sins, because otherwise God would have to send us all to hell for breaking just one rule. We called it grace, but it seemed to be about following rules, sucking up to God, and avoiding condemnation by others - especially church people. As my mother repeated like a mantra, "What will others think?" You had to look good. Your wins had to outnumber your loses. You had to score more points than the other team. Such is the thinking of a child.

Excited About God

It was the summer of 1974 that I first noticed people who were passionate for God. It blew me away. I attended a denomination-wide youth conference, and there was something different about some of the people. They were enthusiastic, excited even. I knew that I wanted it, although I didn't know how to get it.

That fall I made public profession of faith, not because I had that kind of faith, but because I wanted to. I knew my catechism and passed my examination by the elders. I became a "full member" of the church at 16, which was very unusual in our church at that time. (It was generally done en masse by high school seniors as a kind of graduation exercise. Parents got very worried about the eternal destiny of their children if they didn't make profession of faith by 20.)

I grew in my faith. I shared a bit of how God had become more real in my life. I was more enthusiastic about God and faith and religious things. And when I went to Trinity Christian College in the fall of 1976, I gravitated to those who were enthusiastic for God - which meant that most of them were not from the same background. They were Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Catholic, Reformed, Seventh Day Adventist, Bible Church, etc. We shared life together, often spending time with each other in the dining hall for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and times in between.

My family moved "back home" to Grand Rapids (MI) in 1978, and I transferred to Calvin College. I attended Fellowship Chapel and Calvin Christian Fellowship in my search for meaningful faith. I rejoined my old church for a time, spent a year or so attending another one, and finally joined a different one looking for authentic worship. For many years I was part of that congregation's worship committee, working to take old liturgical forms and adapt them to a contemporary setting.

Over the years, I learned to lift my hands in worship - not part of my background. I learned to pray in public, even though I was spiritually dry most of the time. I knew how to be religious, I knew how to follow my convictions, I knew enough that I thought I did know enough. I got involved with the charismatic renewal, which strengthened my faith and helped me feel still closer to God, but through it all I always felt closest through song.

I understood the Bible and theology. I knew our Dutch Reformed tradition. I was passionate about church and faith. I knew that I belonged to God.

The End

I didn't have a clue how far I really was from God - or how far my wife felt from me. I saw inklings that something was wrong in the summer of 2003, and she let me have it in October: She had reached the point where she no longer loved me, no longer cared to be with me, and considered our marriage dead. Not damaged, not in need of repair, but dead.

I hadn't seen that coming, and I was devastated and alone. She had never taken the time to share her concerns with me, although thanks to Internet chat rooms she had shared her feelings, her fears, and her frustrations with her online friends. She had built a support system that, as she later told me, would support her whatever her decision and across the board recommended that she not take the path of divorce.

In one of those cosmic quirks, my passion for Linda had been reignited in May. I loved her, was committed to her, and was in love with her. I tried to rekindle the romance, but nothing worked. She had spent years building her business away from home, living much of her life away from the family, and she'd already decided on some level to shut me out. I was frustrated by my inability to reach her, but we didn't believe in divorce, so there was time to get past it.

Wrong. As I was trying to grow closer - and perhaps because I was - she was shutting me out. That October day when she dropped the bombshell shattered my entire world. I had loved her and allowed her to be the most important person in my life. Our marriage was the relationship that defined me. And she said it no longer existed.

I have never known such emotional pain, such confusion, such frustration, such a sense of loss, such isolation in my life. I responded very poorly, because I was afraid, angry, and lost.

To top it off, she left on a two-week trip to attend a conference and then visit online friends. She dropped this on me and left me to deal with it alone for two weeks. After 22 years of marriage, she ran away. I remember going to church on Sunday with all of this swirling around inside me.

When we pulled into the parking lot, I lost it. We had gone to church together since our college days, and going without her brought everything to a head. I broke down in tears, shaking, and finally managed to ask the boys to find Margie Moore, the minister of congregational life. She came, helped me out of the van, and walked me into the building. We spent the next hour or so together in the church library while the congregation worshiped. I was broken, but Margie's presence let me know that I was not alone.

Purpose

On October 12, 2003 we began working through The Purpose Driven Life at church. It could not have come at a better time. After the week I'd been through alone, it was the lifeline I needed.

Chapter 2, "You Are Not an Accident", reached deep down inside my broken heart. Here are a few underlined sections from my copy of the book, which I try to reread every year:

• Your parents may not have planned you, but God did.
• You are alive because God wanted to create you.
• God left no detail to chance.
• God's purpose took into account human error, and even sin.
• You were created as a special object of God's love! God made you so he could love you.

As I came to summarize it: God planned me, made me, knows everything about me, and still loves me. No failure would change that. I was loved by someone who would never stop loving me. I was not alone.

For the first time in my life, I began to understand that reality. God didn't just exist and give us rules and provide an escape from sin - God loved me, warts and all.

Not to say that I didn't lose perspective now and again as I tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered life, do therapy, and try to rebuild what Linda said was dead. She was right - the marriage was dead. Although I loved her, she had grown cold and no longer cared about me. It took months for that to sink in, and I remember very clearly telling her that I was willing to do anything to make our marriage work - but if she wouldn't invest in it, I couldn't continue working toward an impossible goal.

She took some time to think about that and finally acknowledged that she was not willing to do that. The relationship that had defined my life was finished. We worked out the terms of our divorce, filed, and brought that phase of life to a clear end.

I had some pity parties along the way, mourning my loss, temporarily forgetting the new love I had found from the God who planned me, made me, knew me, and still loved me. That was the new reality on which I built my life.

New Lives for Old

In gratitude to God and as an expression of my newfound faith, I was baptized by immersion in May 2005. God has washed away the old, and I was born into a new life. I shared my testimony with the church:

I lived my life fearing that I would be judged a failure and rejected. I dealt with that by excelling in my work, following the rules, and keeping others at a distance.

If I never let them close, they couldn't hurt me much.

That included God. I followed him according to my own understanding. That meant obeying God's rules like a legalist - I didn't want to give him a reason to reject me.

I've had very few close relationships. When my marriage ended, I discovered that I was so defined by it that I no longer knew who I was.

I felt lost, alone, hopeless.

When I hit rock bottom, I found that I had never been alone - God was with me. Jesus understood my rejection. The Father held me in his arms. The Spirit breathed new life into me.

The truth that God will never abandon me was the lifeline I could cling to against despair.

I had been lost. God found me and told me he that knew me, accepted me, loved me. God's love has humbled me, healed me, remade me.

My baptism today is a testament to God's faithfulness.

Since learning that God made me to love me, not to judge me, nothing has been the same. I have been blessed with new friends, new relationships, a new wife, new passions, and new ministries. I was rescued from my fears and a new life was built on the rubble of the old one.

I have been redeemed and remade.

Thanks be to God!