Things Fall Down

They lived and they died,

They prayed to their gods,

But their stone gods did not make a sound,

And the Empire crumbled, til all the was left

Were some stones the workmen found.

-Sting, All This Time

I don't know if we are living through the end of an Empire.  I read the papers more now than I ever have, which is not always a soothing exercise. Whether it is Fareed Zakarias analyzing the protests in Iran with Alex de Tocqueville's commentary on the French Revolution or Jonathan Capehart summoning H.L. Mencken and Edward Gibbon to make the case that our nation may be the Empire that is imploding, breathless anticipation of old orders passing away seems to be in the air.  For many this creates anxiety, and leads quite often to reactionary sorts of thoughts.  I am fairly certain that our current administration is a symptom, rather than a cause, of such anxiety and the reactionary brand of conservatism it has brought on us all.  Perhaps the Iran situation is easier to see clearly thanks to distance. I think Fareed points out fairly clearly that the Iranian theocracy has been standing athwart the progress of their nation for some time. While it is naive to think that a truly democratic Iran would emerge to champion western ideals, a more secular Iran would be much less likely to be a destabilizing influence in the region, and frankly would be much less frightening to all involved.

While I wonder whether the Iranian protests give a half a fig about what Donald Trump thinks of their struggle, I think, for once, his tweet on the subject may be on target. We should cheer change in Iran, and do what we can in diplomatic fashion to support it, however, what I fear is that we as a nation tend to see moments like this as opportunities for our worst imperialist tendencies to come out and dance.  We start to meddle, demand and otherwise play the big kid on the block.  As it turns out, we may have liked being a "super-power" a little too much and our tendency to try and make the world in our image is sometimes more than we can restrain.

Just as Iran's theocracy deserves to die and be relegated to the dust bin of history, I'm not entirely sure our own regime isn't due for a sturdy rebuke from history.  Perhaps the spirit of self-interest and consumerism is too much for a real democracy.  As I read the excerpts from Wolff's Fire and Fury, I am tempted to believe it, even though I know he is a hack and a purveyor of half truths.  I guess I agree with one of my more conservative sources: 

Let's stipulate that Michael Wolff is not a 100 percent reliable reporter.  The problem (for Trump and his supporters) is that most of what he says is plausible.

The thought that keeps coming back to me is that, in our system we really do get the government we deserve, which in Mencken's decidedly jaundiced view was that: "one day the the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."  The other day, a commentator referred to Trump as "obnoxiously ignorant," which I think gets at the core of what we mean by moron.  Trump is obviously not a moron in the same sense as Spongebob Squarepants (a children's cartoon character who lives most gleefully doing mindless things), he is rather the sort of character who simply refuses to do anything as odious as self-reflection or deep consideration of facts.  Trump is famous for "going with his gut," and "telling it like it is," however, what we see day after day is that he can't or won't really do anything beyond that, which is the most fertile soil for a reactionary, incompetent leader I have ever heard.
Rome survived several mad emperors and the good news is that our version of "bread and circuses," is rolling right along (a strong stock market and lots of Netflix). I am not sanguine that our current direction is rising towards greatness though.  It may be that humanity is advancing to a place of global culture where empires are no longer viable.  That will be cool, but the transition may be painful, particularly for those who are used to power.  Maybe we have invested too much of our faith in the false god of great men.  Maybe it is good and right for the empires and oligarchies to fall, but I am all too aware that what came after the Roman Empire fell is what we call the Dark Ages.
It's an interesting idea that Rod Dreher, whom I quoted above, has seized upon in his rather interesting treatise The Benedict Option.  The general premise of which is that, in his view, the postmodern version of the Dark Ages is, in fact, upon us, and the Church needs to recognize this and close ranks like Benedictines did during the last Dark Ages and keep the light of civilization and Christianity (one and the same to his mind) alive in the safety of our communities while the barbarian hordes and plagues rage through the secular world. While I may take a less dire view of the secular world than Dreher, I do think that relevancy for the Church does at least have something to do with the fact that we can endure the rise and fall of Empires, we've done it several times.  Beyond that, being resurrection people, we can actually endure our very own death.  As G.K. Chesterton sharply observed: "We follow a God who has managed to find his way out of the grave."
So I guess, in the end, even if this is the end, that is where I will put my hope. The community that matters to me more than any other is one that is not built by human hands, that has no frail and broken emperor, president or king to lead it off of the cliffs of history.  I do not know how any of this will go, but unlike certain others I believe we who are part of the Body of Christ are supposed to be right in the middle of it. We do not pray to stone gods, we pray to the Living God, who is love and love casts out all fear, even when things fall down.

Stuff I Learned a Long Time Ago

So buttons huh? Yep, bigger, better buttons.  Buttons with horrifying consequences, buttons that could destroy the world, being available to men who apparently have the mentality of a surly fourth grader.  That's where we are, an implied Armageddon that starts with something like, "my Dad can beat up your Dad."
Let me start with my grumpy old man routine: I grew up in a world where there were real bullies, not just trolls on the interweb.  I have been punched in the face, and I have punched others in the face, I have experienced the raw, adrenaline stoked rage of being in a fight. I get it, violence seems like it will solve things, on some level I agree with this guy:

But I don't agree all the way, because I don't think using your fists makes you a man, but it's a lot better than shooting somebody. When I was a kid, there was that phase where boys on the playground would get into the arguments of the "my Dad can beat up your Dad," sort. I don't remember what the exact context of that was, but I do remember considering the scenario.  I don't think I ever got to the place where I actually worried about my Dad getting beat up.  First of all, I had seen my Dad do really strong stuff, like carry heavy things, dig holes really fast and split wood with an ax.  But before any of that, I understood that my Dad was a grown up of the sort who would almost never get into a fist fight. Other kids apparently didn't have that confidence in their Fathers. I don't remember how exactly this stuff went down, but I do remember knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my Dad wouldn't be getting into a fist fight with that other kids Dad, and that reality was certainly not a weakness.

That did not stop me from getting into fights myself, but it did shape my consciousness concerning violence, so that, as I grew up I at least wanted to fight less and less.  The last time I threw a punch in anger was in college, at a friend of mine who was drunk and disorderly, it was a bad punch, technically and philosophically.  I didn't really want to hurt him, but I was irritated enough with his drunken foolery that I did want to let him know that I wasn't messing around.  I regret that punch more than any other I have ever thrown, not because he didn't deserve it (he did), but because by that point I was fully aware that violence doesn't solve problems and I let my anger and reactivity get the better of me.

As I grew up my heroes were like MacGyver, who wouldn't use guns.  Doctor Who, whose weapon was his mind and a sonic screwdriver, and of course Captain Jean Luc Picard, who unlike a former Captain of the Enterprise very rarely had to monkey flip a giant space lizard, and who mostly had to think his way out of problems. In other words, they were men who could be trusted to handle things like grown-ups, like my Dad would. Ingenuity, intelligence and diplomacy are not boring, or weak, and they are things I would very much like to see our President exhibit rather than bragging about his button.

Shame

No multimedia today, just words, one word really: shame. If you watch Game of Thrones, you will have a distinct visual image to go with this word, but it's an image I will not put on this page, because it's R-rated.  There is a scene where Cersei Lannister is compelled to make a walk of penitence from the Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep through the streets of King's Landing. Her hair has been cut off, her clothes taken and she must walk through the crowd of people who hate her and throw filth at her, while a Septa (a nun-like character) rings a bell and shouts, "Shame."
If you don't watch the show, you need to know that Cersei is not a good person, she is conniving and power-hungry and really someone that you generally hope gets what's coming to her.  Except, somehow, when this happens to her, I actually did not feel any sense of justice.  It's weird really, because the whole sequence didn't really change Cersei for the better. In fact, if anything, it made her harder and more spiteful than ever.  But for a moment I did actually feel bad for her, maybe because the visuals were so striking, but also because, I think, shame is such a deep, dark human emotion, that there is very little in a fictional tale or in reality that can make you detach from it, unless you are an actual sociopath.
Most of us have at least one powerful experience of Shame in our lives, some folks practically live there, and all of us pretty regularly experience Shame's nicer little sister, Embarrassment, on a pretty regular basis.  This, I think, is the reason it becomes such a powerful motivator in our behavior, and for the most part, does not really need explanation. Shame is the shadow of pride, the more proud of something you are the greater your shame will be should that pride fall.  For instance, I feel no shame when I lose a footrace, because I  have never been fast, I do not aspire to be fleet of foot, and the fact of the matter is that life requires very little actual running of me.  If someone is faster than me it is not a source of shame, because I have not pride about that particular aspect.  However, if I am proven to be ignorant of something I feel I should know: shame.  If I am negligent in my duties in life: shame.
Which brings me to the point, the thing that I think we should all feel some shame about in the world today: kindness.  Not entirely abandoning the Sci-fi theme from yesterday there was a sequence in the Christmas episode of Doctor Who, where the Doctor is about to regenerate and he is trying to give advice to the next iteration of himself.  If I were able to do such a thing, I would like to give myself and pretty much anybody who cares to listen the same advice:

Always try to be nice, but never, ever fail to be kind.

It's writing like of that sort that I really hope the new folks taking over the Doctor Who franchise manage to hold on to.  You don't always have to be nice, sometimes you can't, you're cranky, you're afraid, you're just plain tired, maybe someone just doesn't deserve niceness, but they always deserve kindness.  That is what I think explained the strange incongruity of emotions I felt about Cersei's walk of shame, it wasn't kind.  She didn't really deserve nice, she really is a pretty unrepentant character, but the blatant imposition of shame seemed too far, and in the end, it proved more dangerous than kindness would have been.
I worry that, in many areas of life, religion perhaps most of all, we have been too free with the shame.  We shame people for being poor, we shame people for how they look, we shame people for what they do to make a living, we shame people for their personal sins, we shame people for simply being human. We shame people and we claim that we're doing it, "for their own good."
I have seen people with a veneer of nice, impose shame like that bell ringing Septa and those filth flinging peasants.  You can be "nice" and use shame as a weapon, but you cannot be kind and do so.  Kindness recognizes that shame will happen without assistance in most cases, and when it does offers a hand of solidarity or, better yet, a glimmer of grace.
I would like very much to live in a world where I am ashamed of fewer things, and that involves working to make things different.  I don't want to be ashamed of the way my culture treats people like things, so I will act in a way that affirms human dignity.  I don't want to be ashamed of the way my church fails to be Christlike, so I will work every day to be more loving and forgiving.  I don't want to be ashamed by failing to be kind, especially on those days when I just can't muster nice.  I know most often, my kindness fails when I think something is unjust, and on those occasions when I am correct about the injustice, I need to search earnestly for the way to apply kindness to that injustice.
Not always an easy mark to hit, but one worth trying for.

New Years Eve

I've never been much for New Year's resolutions.  I don't really have the willpower for them, and I know it. I do sort of like to look back on the past year and try to learn something or other though. This past year seems like it has contained its share of hard lessons, the first of which is:

And carry a towel if you really want to be sure of preparedness. This time last year, I had a major case of the fear about what 2017 might hold.  This year, while I'm not at all happy about the state of things, I guess the unknown and the things you can make up for yourself to worry about are always mostly worse than what actually goes down. Worrying about the future is one of the most futile ways to occupy your time and it is pretty much a total drain on your emotional reserves.  We all do it, and I don't know anyone who feels like it is a good way to live.  Bad stuff is going to happen, and pretending that it won't will not help at all, but when it does you're going to need all your resources (towels included) to deal with it adequately.
This time last year, I was hoping against hope that a good friend of mine would be able to beat cancer.  He didn't, and I needed to figure out how to deal with that reality.  This time last year, I thought maybe Trump would get us into a war of some sort. He didn't, in fact most of the most dire fears I had about what was going to happen to us as a nation have not materialized. I'm still regularly embarrassed by what he says and dismayed by what he does, but I have decided that I really need to settle down and deal with the reality of the situation rather than what I think might happen because of the decisions made by people I have absolutely no control over.  In other words, I need to heed the words of a wise teacher:

Fear is the path to the Dark Side.

Fear leads to anger, Anger leads to hate,

Hate leads to suffering.

Since I appear to be rolling with a sci-fi themed New Years, how could I leave out the Bene-Gessarit litany against fear:

I must not fear,

Fear is the mind killer.

Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear,

I will permit it to pass over me,

and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn my inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

None of this is really a resolution, just things that I have needed to learn, or re-learn.  I'm putting them down, with pictures, so that some time I can remember what it was I probably shouldn't have forgotten.

Now for something actually important

I just realized that I haven't even written anything about The Last Jedi, I have been so busy with all kinds of serious grown up stuff that I neglected something really important: YODA.  Sorry, before you read any further, if you haven't seen the movie (SPOILER ALERT), I'm going to talk about stuff that happens in the movie that will really be better if you just experience first hand.
So last things first, I understand why some people are upset with this movie. There has been the usual interweb backlash against this thing or that thing and I agree there are some things about the movie that could have been done better, or more specifically, not done at all.  BIG THING that should not have been done: Princess Leia force gliding her way through the icy vacuum of space to basically spend most of the movie in a med-stasis tube.  We all know Carrie Fisher is a glowing force ghost in real life, so why not make her exit the film world too?  She died not long after filming wrapped, they could have given Leia a dignified exit and worked the rest of the story some other way, it would have made so much sense and would have avoided what is probably going to be an off screen death or worse a CGI death.  I'm pretty sure Carrie would have chosen to go out with a blast if they were able to ask her.
Second, less big thing that maybe shouldn't have been done: the entire Finn story line until the reunion with Rey, which was really touching. There is only one reason why Finn and Rose needed to go try and find the master hacker on the casino world, which they don't do and only end up finding a guy who betrays them to the First Order, and that is to introduce DJ, the character played by Benicio Del Toro, who is part and parcel of setting up the whole moral punch of the movie.  DJ gives Finn repeated lessons about how there are no "good guys" and that the galaxy far far away is every bit as morally ambivalent as our own.  I think they could have worked that into the plot without what amounts to a rather lengthy chase on cat-horse things and some scenes that look like Vegas crashed into Mos Eisley.
The third thing that really could have not happened, at least according to my daughter, is that Kylo Ren really didn't need to be as naked as he was in that one scene, but hey that's just a 12 year old's aesthetic critique.
What was done well was a connection with the themes that really made episodes IV through VI great.  People have critiqued the fact that The Force Awakens was essentially a total rip off of A New Hope and it was, but in a good way that is trying to advance the story past Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.  In the second movie of this trilogy, Episode VIII, we have the connections being made to Return of the Jedi: the conversations between Ghost Yoda and Luke, the conversations between Grumpy Luke and Rey, the conversations between Kylo and Rey, they are all offering us evolution of the plot line about balance in the force.  There is enough sameness in the sequence of events to really see how The Last Jedi essentially leaves us at the same spot, story-wise that VI left us.  Snoke, as it turned out, was a giant skeletal red herring, which bummed out a lot of Geeks who had spent considerable time and effort inventing theories about his identity.  But Kylo managed to dispatch his Sith master a lot more cleanly than Vader did with Palpatine.  Kylo Ren evolved in this movie from whiny little punk to pretty serious bad guy in a way that makes me optimistic for where they're going with this arc.
By the end of The Force Awakens, I was quite frankly glad that Rey managed to slice Kylo up, so I didn't have to hear any more about his daddy issues.  By the end of The Last Jedi, I am so ready to see more Kylo.  Also, Rey is no longer the wide-eyed, over-matched orphan kid, and she is a character that is not at all governed by her origin story, which I think is a great direction to head with this.  The prequel trilogy gave me more than a stomachful of ancient prophecies about the chosen one and fulfilling destiny.  I'm liking that this movie basically established a good breaking point from all that sort of stuff and leaves Rey and Kylo, Finn, Poe and Rose free to tell a good story going forward.
The Yoda sighting proves that they will be credibly able to bring Luke and Yoda back at certain opportune moments to provide guidance from beyond.
Near the beginning of the movie, when Rey is trying to convince Luke that the rebellion needs him, he says something like, "what do you expect me to do, charge to the rescue swinging a laser sword?" I was personally glad that he didn't take up that challenge, it provides credibility to his character and honestly sets up what he actually did do in the end.  Honestly, I was afraid that they were going to turn these new movies into nostalgic retirement tours for the original cast, despite the fact that I knew Hamill, Ford and Fisher really didn't want to do it that way.  The new characters give me hope and a sense that they might take this thing in a direction that won't be so dead locked in to a known conclusion.  After all, wasn't it the big secret, that Vader was Anakin, that made Empire Strikes Back  the best of the movies?  I was personally glad that Rey's lineage is not apparently going to be the central plot point of these movies.  Do something new! No we can have new secrets and things to find out.
All of the homage points and scene parallels provide strong enough contacts with what was, we get it, but I'm 43 years old now, my son is older than I was when I started with these movies, I'm really hoping we can grow up a little at this point.

The Angry States of America

There is a lot of anger going around right now.  I felt it this morning when I read the front page description in the Washington Post of the self congratulations that took place on the White House lawn yesterday. The way that a bunch of politicians were now kissing up to Trump and calling him an exceptional leader because they got their "dream" of tax reform through the legislature without doing anything that could be remotely called legislating, well it kind of made me throw up in my mouth a little.
I generally agree with this George Will Column from this morning (please note for the record that George Will is a fairly conservative chap), that the tax bill is not really of such terrible significance, and that it is rife with flawed assumptions and that its hasty passage is an egregious violation of the principles of our government.  But it is not the end of the world, it is simply Washington D.C. showing us, fairly clearly, where its priorities are: with the corporations.  By all accounts corporations are the only real and permanent winners in this deal.  That seems to be the only thing that experts from all over seem to agree on.  The reality that corporations run the world is not new, or surprising to anyone who has bothered to pay attention.
What makes me nauseous is the smug pretense of politicians who think we're buying their propaganda.  They're not on our side, none of them, they just proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt, and they think a couple thousand bucks a year is enough to buy us off.  Maybe it is, we've all got a price, and mostly it is lower than we would like to imagine.
Those stuffed suits up the road are missing something fairly critical in our world right now: we are a bunch of angry folks.  The Democrats ignored it to their peril for the past eight years and hung on to a vision of hope and change.  They talked about national unity and rising to the challenges that face us, and it got them booted from their majority in congress and left them hanging on to Barack Obama as their only hope.  But their hope came with a term limit.  The GOP, rather than ignoring the anger, decided (foolishly methinks) to try and harness it and ride it into power.  The Tea Party was the early incarnation, and Trump is also a symptom.  Many people voted for Trump as thumb in the eye of the establishment on both sides of the aisle, he is a repudiation of both the Clinton machine and the Old Guard of the GOP.  Naive people felt like D.C. would pull him in and make him be presidential and responsible.  His Twitter feed demonstrates that is a false doctrine.  This tax plan, if not for its content then certainly for its process, is a Golem of hasty and incompetent legislation.  It is what you get when you are just trying to appease the reptilian brains of your donor class, and the monstrous ego of Donald J Trump, who really needed to start winning something.
It will not do what they think it will do, and people know it, and it's making the anger worse.  We are just so very angry at things, and I wish I didn't have to include myself in this diagnosis, because I know it's unhealthy.  I preached a sermon last Sunday to a handful of people at our early service (it was Cantata week) where I talked about the three I's that are symptoms of our problems.  I was talking about the church, but as the week has gone on I think this applies to our society on a broader scale.  The I's are: Irritability, Irrationality and Irrelevance.  They are linked together and one feeds into the others.  In the church the I of Irrelevance is probably a little more clear than in the world in general, but it has to do with the fact that we just aren't what we used to be, we are being out-competed by other stuff.  The Church used to be the center of most communities, it wielded significant authority and formed the core of the social structure, not so much anymore. We now sort of get the leftovers after all the other stuff is taken care of, and that makes us irritable, because we used to occupy such a high station.  I think that the anger of people in this country is motivated by similar feelings related to the loss of high station, the particular thing they feel they have lost may differ from person to person, because there are a lot of privileges on the list that we are losing: whiteness, maleness, "christianity," heterosexuality, cis-gender identity, middle class, working class, traditional family structure, educational status, professional esteem, and the list really goes on and on.  I'm not criticizing people for feeling angst about losing these privileges, losing things makes you irritable, even if it's just misplacing your car keys, I just feel like maybe we are in danger of harming ourselves and others, in other words we have become irrational. That's what happens a lot when people have anger at things that are far beyond their control. But technically, and maybe it is only technically, this stuff should not be beyond our control, we have been given the gift of living in a democratic republic, where we have a voice, maybe it's time to stop shouting in futility and actually do something.
We really need to get serious about taking our Democracy back from these oligarchs that have gotten a hold of it, and I'm talking about on both sides of the aisle.  Maybe it's even time to break the two party stranglehold.  Most other advanced nations have more than two viable parties, maybe we need to shoot the donkey and the elephant and move on. Hysteria is not going to help, party loyalty definitely isn't going to help.  We need to start channeling our anger into something besides impotent rage at the man like a bunch of high school seniors giving the finger to their principle on the last day of school.  That's going to mean looking beyond the self-involvement and self-interest that adolescents are so very good at.  We're going to have to recover the nature of politics as the practice of serving the people, all the people, not just your constituencies or your donors.  I know it's a big job, but if we don't do it anger is going to eat us alive.

Of Containers

Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, 

did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, 

whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying,

 "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"

-2 Samuel 7: 7

This is from one of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for this Sunday.  It will probably be like the chubby kid when sides are picked for dodge ball and not get chosen.  I'm certainly not going to turn aside from Angels and Shepherds and Mary pondering things in her heart to preach about Nathan and David having a bad idea.  That's why I have this blog right?

For those of you not familiar with the context of this story, David has the bright idea, after he is all settled in his nice palace, to actually build a temple for God, where they will keep the Ark of the Covenant (yes that Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones movie) and where all the people can come and visit the courts of the Most High God.  David tells Nathan and Nathan thinks it's a super cool idea too, so they're about to go through with it, when God comes to Nathan in a dream and says essentially, "Boy, you two done lost your minds!" 

See, God never asked for a temple, he never really even needed a tent, people tend to feel better about their relationship with God if they have nice buildings where they can meet up.  Temples and tabernacles are like that coffee shop on Friends, where you can be sure that someone will be there.  If you think about it though, it's a silly idea at best, that God would somehow be that localized of a phenomenon.  It's also highly derivative of pagan practices where shrines were built and deities had tremendously specific powers, desires and locations.  The second scroll of Samuel records this story of David and Nathan having their minds changed, but it goes on to allow for the Temple anyway, just it has to be Solomon that builds the thing.  It's one of those places where the Bible is definitely shown to be very much a human document that reflects the understanding of a specific people who were very much culturally and geographically bound to their own way of seeing and understanding God.

A lot of the Hebrew Scriptures work under the presupposition that trying to contain God is a foolhardy enterprise.  From one of the oldest texts, Job, we find God speaking out of a whirlwind and challenging Job to man up and defend the idea that God should somehow justify God's actions to a regular mortal person. Job, confronted with the presence of God, realizes the arrogance of his presumption and repents in dust and ashes.  Moses deals with the reality that the presence of God often makes his life very, very difficult, likewise Elijah and most of the Prophets.  One of the most fundamental mistakes of human beings in these stories, from Abraham, to Moses, to David and pretty much everyone else is to try and make God in your own image, rather than the other way around.

God resists that impulse with the fire of thousand suns.

It doesn't matter how good and beautiful your container is, God will not fit inside of it.  Which is why I always get this sort of strange feeling around this time of year, like I'm a man without a country.  I can't really abide the sweet, sentimental visions of the Christmas story.  Partly because I'm well aware of the darkness that surrounds the light. The world that Jesus was born into was a hard place and his life was vulnerable and in danger before he was even born.  Herod, Caesar, even the respectability of Joseph and Mary's families, are all threats to Jesus ever even drawing breath.

But there is another reason as well, and that reason has to do with the very stories themselves.  It sort of starts with the fact that the Gospels of Mark and John don't really even talk about Jesus' birth at all, and it is at least partly informed by our remarkable talent for idolatry.  These stories open up the truth of the incarnation to attacks from those whose hermeneutics and epistemology seem aimed at proving the Christ to be just another mythological creation or a theological mirage.  There is something about the nature of these stories that is dangerous to us.  You can read all sorts of analyses that "prove" that these birth narratives are really just ripping off the cult of Mithras or something along those lines.  When I read this sort of thing, I understand why God told David and Nathan to cease and desist.  The container will not hold.

What I have come to realize though is that the stories are not the problem, it is our tendency to want them to be rigid and ironclad historical accounts that is the problem.  The birth of Jesus stories, like the Creation accounts in Genesis are really touching and beautiful things, full of mystery and wonder, full of human fragility and God's majesty intimately connected, one to the other.  Embracing this mystery and letting God be free to be wherever God is, rather than trying to lock God up in your special little temple, is the essence of the story.  Jesus is born in an unexpected place, to people who aren't important in any worldly sense.

It is actually our authoritarian and idolatrous impulses that create the very slippery slope that many folks decry.  The argument goes that if you start to pick and choose what parts of the Scripture you believe, sooner or later you won't believe any of it.  I would say that it is rather important to go beyond simply believing or disbelieving and actually get into a living relationship with Scripture.  The people who are least able to actually do this are people who insist on everything fitting neatly inside the lines of what they think they know. Life is messy.  Human life is profoundly messy.

At the end of Luke 2, after the good Doctor has given us all the stories about shepherds and angels and then told us about Simeon and Anna with their visions and oracles, then told of the time that the boy Jesus gave his parents a terrible fright by disappearing only to turn up the temple, in other words, most of the material that we know and celebrate during Advent and Christmas, and which is not well corroborated by history or even other Gospels, it says that "His Mother (Mary) treasured all of these things in her heart."

Some seize on that to mean that Mary was actually the source for Luke's accounts, and that very well might be, but it seems to me that the more important thing about these stories is that they are valued and loved (treasured) for all their mystery and their messiness.  Don't make that old mistake over and over again.  God does not need you to build him walls of cedar or anything else. The Scripture tells us that the goal is for the dwelling place of God to be with us and us with him, Jesus shows us how possible that is, it's a shame that we so easily forget it and try to build the stupid temple anyway.