Co-missioners,
Some post-Christmas thoughts from our editor as we plunge toward Epiphany.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Late Christmas Observations
by Jerome Burce
A Prelude of Sorts—
From Wikimedia Commons
Today is the Ninth Day of Christmas in Western Liturgical Time—WLT, if you will. In BST—Boring Secular Time—it’s a deflating January 2nd, a time for recalling that yesterday’s rousing hurrah for 2025 has done nothing whatsoever to mitigate the daily grind we knew in 2024. The drudge goes on, as we all discovered this morning.
Whereas by way of contrast, in WLT we’d be pointing each other for a ninth day in a row to the one God sent to slog with us through all of 2025, his job being the especially grievous drudge of cleaning up the messes we continue to be and the ones we’re bound to make along the way. God, after all, remains weirdly determined to keep thinking well of us—of every other human being, of course. No, I can’t explain why this should be. Nor can you. But there it is.
No wonder the angelic army boomed that song of songs over Bethlehem on the first Christmas Eve. Gloria in excelsis deo! Let’s all echo it tonight before we go to bed.
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Emmanuel and Then Some—
I got an official note of sorts on the day after Christmas urging me to locate the joy of the season in the word “Emmanuel.” God-with-us. God-with-all-of-us, as the note underscored a number of times. It’s as if the ubiquity of God’s “with-us-ness” was the thing of things that made it so good. No one misses out.
And here I thought I was stubbing my toe on what has struck me more and more of late as a faulty though all-but axiomatic assumption of current thinking in the Protestant mainline, also in its Lutheran guise. It seems to go like this: since “God is good all the time and all the time God is good”—thus the mantra—then God’s presence with us can only be experienced as a good thing. Gone is the need to press the older question of how God is present, whether as friend or enemy, as critic or defender, as the God who kills or the God who makes alive (see Hannah’s song, 1 Sam. 2:6). These days God isn’t allowed to kill, or so I glean from the pastoral chatter I stumble across on Facebook now and then. If those shepherds in the field “fear a mega-fear” when the angel shows up and the glory-light goes on, it’s because they’re either uninformed or outdatedly superstitious. Really, that babe in yonder manger lies there not to so much to save them as to set them straight about how God has been graciously present with them all along—and not only with them, of course, but with everybody, a thing of which we all have to be reminded over and over again.
Thus the thrust of what I seem to hear—and hence (I suspect) of the note I got. Which, as I look at it again, drops no particular hint as to why it’s good that God is here or why God’s presence is something for anyone to welcome. This struck me as a gaping hole when I first read the note.
Then a day or two later that hole got more than filled when I chanced across a 2015 lecture by theologian Oswald Bayer entitled “What Keeps Faith Alive, or, On What Does It Depend” (in Logia: A Journal of Lutheran Theology V. 27: 2, p. 72-74). A prior reader had singled out the passage I quote below. It’s Bayer’s riff, one might say, on that word Emmanuel, rendered here in the alternative spelling—
Notice here how Bayer puts flesh and blood (double entendre intended) on that otherwise skeletal conception of God’s presence—God’s “with-us-ness” as I keep wanting to say. Even if one grants (as one should not) that this presence is necessarily benign, there is no reason to imagine that the announcement of it necessarily qualifies as good news. At most any party there’s a guest or two who stand in the corner merely looking on, contributing nothing whatsoever to what P.G. Wodehouse would call the feast of reason and the flow of soul. Really, who wants such guest to keep hanging around? Why bother with the mere presence of God when you’re standing in Times Square watching the ball drop for 2025? So what if God is “with us” this whole year through? What difference can it make?
Enter Bayer with his synthesis of saintly Lutheran thinking about the presence of God and why I’d be mad not to want it. It starts with how God is present—in that manger, that baby; later in that man on that cross, the one they nailed him to. Turns out that “with-us” God is a busy and active God who insists on doing what only God can do to make and keep us forever present to him. So he “accounts us righteous” and does this even when he finds us “locked in our spiteful and despondent hearts.”
Now there’s a presence worth talking about, or better still, worth singing about as those legions of angelic soldiers did that first Christmas Eve. Unto you is born this day in the city of David an active and grasping presence of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Grasping in the sense that once he has you in his grip he simply will not let you go. And yes, this applies as much to everybody else as it does to you.
Again, Gloria in excelsis, etc.
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Last Month’s Not So Naked Public Square—
To wrap things up this week I point you to four sparkling pieces of Christian witness and reflection that surfaced in thoroughly public venues during the recent lead-up to Christmas. Three were opinion pieces in the New York Times. The other was a concert in Dresden, Germany. I pass them along without much comment, suspecting that most all of you will be as glad for them as I was.
The New York Times pieces were especially striking, appearing as they did in quick succession on December 19, 22, and 24. The first, by the estimable David Brooks, describes his move in recent years from agnosticism to the joy of trusting God. His title: “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be.” The next is an exploration by David French, an unabashedly devout evangelical, of a question that weighs on most anyone who dares to trust Jesus these days. “Why Are Christians So Cruel?” French asks. Finally, along comes guest columnist Peter Wehner who has emerged in recent years as a regular Christmas essayist for the Times. His latest topic: “Why It Matters That Jesus Came From a Dysfunctional Family.” That reflections of this clarity, depth, and perception are out in the open for all to encounter and peruse if they so desire is very cheering. Kudos to the New York Times.
From Wikimedia Commons
And now to the concert that YouTube algorithms tugged me into watching some days ago. It was the 2024 edition of Dresden’s annual Advent concert, held in the Frauenkirche, the city’s reconstructed Lutheran “cathedral” as many choose to call it. As the video will show—thou shalt not fail to watch it—the music was grand and the building packed, so packed that screens were set up to accommodate the overflow crowd in the surrounding outdoor plaza. Comes at the end the bit that gave me goosebumps. The strains of Schütz, Handel, Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn having all died away, the concert concludes as one of Bach’s cantatas might, with a rousing rendition by orchestra, choirs and congregation of a classic Advent chorale, in this case the great Mach Hoch Die Tür, first and final stanzas. (That’s “Lift Up your Heads” or “Fling Wide the Door” in our poor English translations.) At this point the evening’s lovely MC puts down her microphone and steps into a pew to join the singing. And even as this unfolds inside, we see the crowd outside singing as well: “Komm, o mein Heiland Jesu Christ, mein Herzens Tür dir offen ist.” (Come, O my Savior, Jesus Christ / the door of my heart is open to you.)
Imagine hearing such a thing in our own public squares. Thanks be to God that one can see and hear it somewhere.
Happy New Year!
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JB
Roaming Shores, Ohio
