I also can't help being overly-cynical at the way people go about spending over this season. Now I don't care if people who can afford it spend a million dollars on Christmas, what gets me is those who don't have it who try to make it up by just going into extreme debt this time of year. And the useless gifts people buy...it's that whole philosophy of trying to buy the love of your children. Last year the local newspaper had a debate about whether there whould be a Wal-Mart in one of the smaller cities in the area. One person wrote in and said there should be because every Christmas they had to drive 45 minutes to the next-closest Wal-Mart to buy Christmas presents and couldn't afford to go anywhere else because with the large amount they spend Wal-Mart saved them money. They noted spending well over $1000 dollars. I'm sorry, but if the only place you can afford to shop is Wal Mart and you are spending well over $1000 on Christmas, you need to tone down a little. Or maybe your children really need that "Cow Pie" game of the life-sized Minnie Mouse or every movie you can find to put them in front of the TV all day.

Every year I show the movie "I am Sam" with my students and after the fact ask them if they would rather have a parent like the character played by Michelle Pfeifer in the movie who buys their child everything but doesn't spend any time with him, or the character played by Sean Penn who has no money but spends all the time he can with his daughter. Almost to a person they answer with Sean Penn, and these are spoiled rotten little kids who are as selfish as they come. Need I say more.

Christians really need to give up the idea that Christmas has anything to do with the birth of Christ. It is really void of all meaning anymore, what with the consumerism that drives the culture we live in, we can fight and claw but in reality, we might as well just give it up. Maybe we can create our own alter holiday, the day after or something. Or maybe in October. I would bet a large figure of money that for well less than 10% of American Christians, Christmas is not tainted by consumerism, who are we kidding? Then we use the excuse that we don't want to keep this tradition from our children...yeah, like they aren't spoiled enough the way it is. (Shaq brought a truck load of bikes, PS2's, etc to the children in LA yesterday, how about food for their parents and college scholarships to break the cylce of depravity...forgive my cynicism.) To add to that, this holiday has pagan traditions, as Missler notes the following in his K-House news:

The date of December 25th, which was officially proclaimed by the church fathers in AD 440, was actually a vestige of the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, observed near the winter solstice, which itself was among the many pagan traditions inherited from the earlier Babylonian priesthood.

I'm sorry, I just can't do it, and that is why I have become the Scrooge of Christmas. Yet, as Vox Day points out, it doesn't matter, "For to us a child is born..." and that child would sacrifice Himself on a Roman cross to bring you and me in His Kingdom. Whether we celebrate it or not, it is there and for that I am thankful!

Yoder makes a very intriguing point when he writes:

"The 'original meaning' of a text or its author will not stand still, as an earlier scholasticism assumed, since every reader does something new with it. The 'History' itself 'as it really happened' will not stand still either, since the meaning of events is never free from interpretation."

This may very well be true, yet the goal of every Christian at least should be to interpret the text as it was meant when it was written. We have to read it with neutral eyes. We can't read our life experiences into what God is trying to tell us. I admit that it's almost impossible to pull off, yet that doesn't mean it shouldn't be our goal. Abiding by the law or the "principles of the Kingdom of God" are impossible as well, does that mean we don't seek to obey them? By no means!

Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" is a very interesting novel. It's an anti-war work about a man who fights in WWII and gets his arms and legs blown off and loses his sight, hearing, and smell. Yet he lives, although he wished he were dead. The novel is then basically about his thoughts as he lies in bed and is unable to communicate with the outside world.

In Chapter 17 he writes about Christmas as he finally is able to communicate with a lady nurse who figured out that he understands Morse Code. She wishes him "Merry Christmas" which gets him reflecting on his Christmas traditions of his youth. It's very moving and appropriate to this time of the year. Let me summarize as briefly as I can his reflections on the birth of Christ as he can remember. You really need to read this on your own.

"She (his mother) had a marker in the Bible and she opened it now to the place that was marked and began to read again. She read the story of the Christ-child of the baby Jesus and how he was born in a manger...All the people were going to Bethlehem because it was tax time and they had to appear at the court house and register and pay up...Joseph had to do a lot of chores before he could start out and Mary his wife was pregnant and couldn't help him so they were late...As soon as they got into town Joseph began making the rounds of cheap rooming houses. He wasn't much of a success at making money and they only had enough to pay taxes and one night's rent...Then Joseph began to talk very seriously to the hotel manager. See here he said I've come a long way and I've got my wife with me and she's going to have a baby. Look at her out there on the donkey, you see she's just a kid and she's scared...(Hotel manager talking)It'll be an awful mess if she has a baby on the premises, people who can't afford them shouldn't have babies anyway but what are you going to do about it...I don't mind telling you I hope very much she doesn't have the baby here tonight because it'll upset my guests if she screams and they're all very high class people including three Roman congressmen...Oh I almost forgot, don't light any fires out there in the barn because in my insurance it says they're forbidden...Back in the manger Joseph lighted a lantern and fixed up a nice bed on the hay and Mary lay down on the bed and had her baby...

And so the story of how our Risen Savior was born into the world...

I just finished watching "The Stepford Wives." Terrible movie, totally different than I expected. Basically just man-bashing. The men are the weaker sex so they program their wives to be "perfect." Then the program reverses and the women are "liberated" and the men have to do all the work again. Feminist...

Also finished reading "The United States of Europe." Great book! A few blogs ago I said I had no interest in Europe, since reading this book my mind has changed, if only for curiosity sake. Quite a continent and quite a revolution going on there from the sounds of it.

Just one point to elaborate on. The author talks a lot about their welfare system, high taxes, free health care, etc. He also stresses how much aid they send to foreign nations. It is really intriguing, but I can't let myself buy out to this system. There is no question in my mind that the private sector can do things better and cheaper than the government. There must be some control of course but why not let the people and the supply/demand dictate the prices and services. And with as much as they send in overseas aid, the world is getting worse and worse. That tells me that there is too much beaurocracy in the system and as my book proposal says, more can be done on a one-on-one basis.

Last, I have gotten well into Yoder's "The Politics of Jesus." It looks like his thesis is much different than I had imagined. Instead of pushing for a political Jesus who concerned Himself with government affairs, he is proposing that Jesus was political in the way of a revolutionary that the system of the day had to get rid of in order to maintain their control. That I can buy. Maybe that's why the current religious system had to get rid of Jesus as well, they couldn't control the people who put their hope and faith in Him!

T.R. Reid in "The United States of Europe" writes about the former imperialistic zeal of the European countries from around 1500 to 1900. He notes,
"A more cynical, and probably more accurate, summary of the imperial impulse can be found in the mnemoic device used by generations of freshman cramming for the final in European History 101: the colonists were driven by gold, God, and glory...The missionary impulse was also strong for most of the European colonists; there were few who doubted that spreading the one true faith to 'lesser breeds without the law' was an admirable calling."
I wonder how much of the thrust of imperialism was truly to spread the Gospel. I would bet it was more the other two, gold and glory, and not glory for God but for the Queen. Spreading Christianity was lucrative, what with the broadening of the tax base and with the church being tied to the state, this would have been a great moneymaker. It sickens me to think of those being tortured who would not convert to Christianity, definitely not the Gospel I am familiar with or the Bible I have read.

New Book Idea

The idea of publishing a book has always interested me, even though I have very little writing skills. Nevertheless, while lying awake in bed last night, the idea for a book popped into my head. With extreme poverty and depravity around the world today, many ask what can be done to curb the violence and desperation. I have always belived it would be one at a time. While in Kenya this past summer, with the problem of well over 2 million AIDS orphans looming large, we asked what could be done, and the Africans told us the well-known story of the starfish, where the young boy stands on the shore firing washed-up starfish into the ocean. A man asks him what difference he is making, the boy says it is a difference to this one.

Much the same, I believe the way to make a difference in this world is to help one at a time and hope in turn they help another and so on. I plan to interview various people/organizations and get an idea of what they are doing and simply turn that into a book of stories. It may not make New York Times best sellers but it may be interesting.

You never know...

What I was basically saying in my previous post is that I believe the goal of biblical teaching/obedience is to translate the teachings of Jesus into modern culture and that this can be a very difficult task.

How does one respond to opposition from within? If one is being opposed within a church, how does one handle this? How about within a culture? It seems that this was what Jesus experienced in His time on earth, he was opposed within His culture, religion, even within His family. How did He react?

It appears that He reacted by beginning a new social order, He commissioned twelve men to be leaders of this new social order and He taught them how it would be. Then He went back home and left behind the Church.

Much the same, today when we experience opposition or even apathy either from without or from within, it seems the logical thing to do is start something new. It doesn't have to be bold or radical, just a fresh start. I'm not against churches closing their doors or starting over if what they are doing is not working. The same with businesses or social groups, if what we are doing is not working, if we are not experiencing what we are longing for in a group or in life, and if this is due to dynamics or whatever, we can and I believe must start over. What is the option? Working through the problems sometimes bear fruit, but also frequently cause us to put too much energy into something that doesn't want to budge. Starting over may same time and energy and yield greater fruit.

What I'm saying here I don't really know, but it gets me thinking about my personal life. There are things I would like to change, and in essence it means starting over with quite a few things, like how I spend my time, what I devote myself to, etc. I believe this starting over will yield much greater relationships within my family and the family of God and yield much more fruit.

Now the hard part is actually doing it.

I end by claiming the right, as always, that what I write is by no means binding and I reserve the right to change my mind as soon as this is posted :)

I began reading John Howard Yoder's "The Politics of Jesus" this evening. It had been on my reading list for some time and I finally cracked it open. It may prove to be a little dull and different than expected. It seems to be quite academic. In any case, the following quote caught me:

First there is an enormous distance between past and present to be covered by way of hermeneutics from exegesis to contemporary theology.

I really have no idea what Yoder truly meant here, but what I gathered was that there is long way from the teachings and actions of Jesus and their contemporary relevance today. His purpose is of course politics and ethics, but for our purposes it goes beyond that.

Isn't that truly the problem though with much teaching and interpretation today, what did it mean and what does it mean. How can we translate the teachings in the times of Jesus to today. Some have changed, some still should remain, where are the barriers between the two? That is my struggle right now, and I am hoping to entertain a deeper study of the Gospels to begin to formulate an opinion on this.

It's really weird, I despise the Christmas Holiday, it's just gotten too consumer-oriented and really there is very little "Birth of Christ" meaning left in it. I would like to boycot it totally but with our culture as it is that is really impossible.

But here is the catch. Every year I say I am not going to participate, not going to buy presents (of course I still accept the ones I get even though I tell people not to buy me anything) and so on. Yet when the last week or two before the big day come, I get drawn to buy people presents and I get into the "Christmas spirit." I don't know what it is, it repels me yet I still fall for it. What is it about our psychie (sp?) that draws us to those things we don't want to be associated with? Maybe it's the flesh, maybe it's just that we can't escape it in our culture. I don't know, but it really has me thinking.

I know, I'm becoming nothing more than a quoter of Vox, I've been meaning to write something of my own lately, hopefully this week some time. Until then, here's another good one from the man:

The seed planted in the Sixties, when it became fashionable to be more concerned with passing political fads than any search for the truth, has flowered and found deep root.

This from Vox Day on the culture no longer celebrating Christmas, but choosing instead the "Happy Holidays" path:

Corporations have no conscience. A season or two of holiday sales sans Christmas shoppers and we'll be seeing verses from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John on every store front, advertisement and Web page. Christmas survived 70 years of communism, it can conquer politically correct capitalism too.

Now you can get your pet's picture taken with Santa Claus at Pet's Smart for only $9.95.