belief

This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.

 — Luke 2:12

A sign. That’s all we ask for. A sign that this craziness we call Christianity is for real and that we can trust it. That we can trust it with our hearts, with our lives, with our children’s lives. That it’s safe to believe in a God who loves us enough to come and share that love in the only way that matters: heart to heart.

And that’s exactly what we believe God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

Does it sound hard to believe? Maybe. But what is love, if not the reason of belief in the unbelievable? Do we believe ourselves so unworthy of love and happiness that we sabotage anything good that comes our way by relying too much on our heads, and not enough on our hearts?

While I was looking out the window this morning, I noticed a man carrying a sign near the bus stop. Curious, I reached for my bioptic to read what was so important to him that he would walk back and forth in the pouring rain.

The sign read, “I believe in angels.” 

And that made me wonder what that sign is saying to us.

To me, it points to our desire to set aside for a moment the stone-faced, scientific view of the world, and see things again through the eyes of a child. We long for eyes that'll see beyond what our minds say is possible to the realities we can know only with our hearts.

As believers, we recognize that the cold and calloused view of the world misses most of God’s subtlety. And He's nothing if not subtle. Take the Christmas story, for instance; it’s certainly evidence that God isn’t in the business of compelling faith through high drama.

The Lord doesn’t typically drop out of the sky and shout, “Here I am!” Instead, it’s more like the line in O Little Town of Bethlehem”

“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given …”

It’s always up to us to decide whether we’re going to believe or not. Yes, God wants us to believe, but He never forces the issue. So God comes quietly, like the fog, as Carl Sandburg wrote, on little cat feet.

Some of that subtlety indeed went out the window in the skies outside Bethlehem. But give God a little room to work here: we are talking about the birth of the Savior of the World. It’s news that deserves all the pomp and circumstance God can muster.

But still, God’s sign to the shepherds wasn’t a whole choir of angels singing, it wasn’t the brightness of a hundred suns shining. It was a poor baby snoozing away in a manger — a baby the shepherds would have to seek and find for themselves.

Isn’t it just like God to say, “I’ve done my part. Now it’s your turn. You go. You see. You test me to see whether all this is true.”

I have to give the shepherds credit. These were no great scholars, no holy men studied in the great prophecies of the Jewish faith. I’m sure none of them went around quoting scripture to one another. No, these were rough men, guys who knew what it was to sleep in the dust with wind clawing at their faces. After the angels left, they could’ve simply looked at each other and with a nod agreed never to talk about it again.

But they didn’t.

Instead, they obeyed and went to Bethlehem. They took off not walking, but running. They ran to see the sign that would confirm the truth of all they’d seen and heard. They ran to find their Savior, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger — a great big God, in the face of a tiny baby. This was their sign, the way God chose to let the shepherds in on the plan for the salvation of the world. That night, in the face of that baby, God became real to them, maybe for the first time in their whole weary lives.

I have to believe that when it happened, they were changed. They saw and believed and praised God — not just to each other, but to everyone they saw. And these men whom most people would dismiss as ignorant, dirty wanderers after sheep — the kind of folks who, when you saw them, would make you want to keep your wallet close — these men became the first outside of Mary and Joseph to know the truth about this baby, and the first to share it. God had given the shepherds a sign and made them a sign to others. The angels weren’t the ones singing God’s praises in the stable. Instead, God had left that to the shepherds.

So I wonder on this rainy morning, looking out the window to watch the man tell the world that he believes in angels: what’ll be your sign? What’ll it take for God, for Christ, to be real to you? We may not be able to go searching for the manger baby, but I do believe there’s evidence of Him to be found everywhere, if only we look with the right eyes.

I’ve heard it said, and I believe it, that the outward signs of God’s presence get fewer and fewer as we grow in our faith.  Most of the time now for me, the strongest sense I have of God’s presence is here, sitting in front of a screen as I reflect on the day's events and lives that have intersected with mine.

But then on my way outside to talk with the Amazon driver, I saw a single dandelion, almost level with the ground, flattened by the footprints of those who came and went. What business, I wondered, does a dandelion have growing in the middle of a parking lot?

I took it as God’s sign to me that this day, there’s life. I took it as my sign that there’s truth in the unbelievable, that there’s truth in Christ and all the Church has to say about Him. I took it as my sign that this day, there’s hope.

I’ve no idea what your sign will be. It may be small — maybe even smaller than my dandelion. But remember the Lord’s subtlety. Remember how a great big God became known to some shepherds in the face of a tiny baby.

Just keep your eyes open.

Sometimes all it takes is the courage to believe.

broken hallelujahs

Shortly after my sister Polly passed away, I went through a brief, albeit tumultuous, period when I sensed that my prayers bounced off the church ceiling or my bedroom at night. Or if I was outside, perhaps they floated up a ways but then drifted down, like helium balloons when the buoyant gas leaked out.

It was as if all my prayers were just coming back to me as echoes of myself — no better, no higher, revealing nothing divine. At best, they might make me a better person, if I didn’t misguide myself in Jesus’ name.

But where was Jesus? Was it possible to reach Him at all? There was little point, I thought, in just bouncing prayers off ceilings.

At a retreat one summer night, we sang “Just As I Am.” Somehow, without any trigger whatsoever, I found myself careening over an abyss that can only be described as the absence of the Lord — certainly not a fear of hell or anything of that sort, just an incredible sense of a vast universe and all eternity and me alone in the silence and the dark.

I thought about that song that evening, and I prayed as I had never before done. I surrendered and I sought. I fell into that abyss of all alone. If there was a Lord at all, I would fall until He caught me up out of the emptiness, and I would not grab for anything to keep me from that end, not one straw of will or reason.

It was long after midnight when utter emptiness and deepest desire were displaced in a moment. This is where words fail. Completely. The spiritual presence which came to me was simply beyond anything I’d known or was capable of conjuring or can find language to explain, then or now. Light is an apt metaphor. Love was the essence. Tremendous reassurance. And revelation — of the essential goodness of being and all things. An untying of every twisted little knot of pain or sorrow or angst in my soul. A certain knowledge that the perceived necessity of our living as twisted, knotted creatures was indeed an illusion, a lie from the Enemy that comes from living in a world in which the Divine is partly (and sometimes almost completely) veiled. The knowledge that hate is superfluous and love is a divine gift to be shared without limit or end.

What I needed to know of Jesus to live a Godly life came to me that night, as palpable presence and revelation. I haven’t always fully lived up to that revelation, but there’s no question of me denying my Savior, not ever. I can’t disbelieve what I encountered. It’s helped to make me who I am.

Leonard Cohen’s haunting anthem Hallelujah always sounds like notes of truth for me. He writes,

There’s a blaze of light
in every word,
it doesn’t matter which you heard,
the holy or the broken Hallelujah

Mostly, we hear broken Hallelujahs. Our sermons, our songs, my words on this page — all these are broken Hallelujahs because we simply can’t piece together words that serve as adequate vessels to hold and pour out the divine. And whatever we do piece together is always, well, full of us.

In our time, Hallelujah has been corrupted for political campaign slogans by those who know how to harness religion for their own ends. Hallelujah has been enslaved to intolerance and injustice in the name of a righteousness that forgets the very nature of Jesus. Hallelujah has been co-opted to serve the rich and fleece the poor, in an inversion of the beatitudes.

And perhaps nowhere is this hijacking as evident at the moment as in our own backyards.

There’s violence that confronts us around every corner, from the misguided and broken young girl who picked up a gun and entered a church preschool in an evil attempt to quiet her personal demons to the physical assaults on a young collegiate swimmer who speaks undeniable truths regarding fairness and common human decency.

The Enemy creates a wall of noise and visual static in an attempt to silence our faith and there are times when it seems as though he’s winning the battle.

But we of faith know how this ends.

That night at the retreat, Jesus spoke to me very clearly and decisively: pay close attention. Listen. Learn. Witness, for them; for Me.

All around us are stories of unparalleled grace and compassion under the most extreme circumstances; stories of people in schools and theaters and offices who put their personal safety aside to reach out to the slightly injured and severely wounded, oblivious to the danger around them.

Oblivious to the evil around them.

What these people collectively did (and what they continue to do) is nothing short of astonishing. There are stories upon stories of ordinary men and women who performed extraordinary acts of courage and compassion for their fellow man. Day after day, more definitive lines are being drawn, and neither the deeds of Satan nor the shadow of death are plausible matches for these profoundly selfless acts of grace.

 My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.

— 1 John 3:18

And love one another in deed and in truth they did. They do.

It’s time, and perhaps this is perpetually so, for us to examine our broken Hallelujahs, to sort out our blazes of light from our flawed humanity. Let’s all make today a new chapter in our lives, and renew our promise to Jesus to do just that.