Perceptions from a Pewboy

In the animated Christmas classic, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the viewing audience is introduced to the Island of Misfit Toys. The toys living on this island are ostracized from the other toys in the world because they are functionally or cosmetically flawed. On this island, for example, there lives a squirt gun that only shoots jelly; a toy train with square wheels; a stuffed elephant with spots; even a Charlie in the Box who laments that he was not given the name “Jack.”

The mood on the Island of Misfit toys is understandably somber. The misfit toys long to be played with, but no one ever comes to the island to claim them. Each Christmas Eve brings about a particular sadness on the island as the inhabitants realize that other “normal” toys will be joyfully embraced by eager children the next morning. The misfit toys, on the other hand, can only dream of such an embrace. After all, in the words of one of the misfit toys, “no one wants to play with a Charlie in the Box!”

As a child, when I watched Rudolph for the first time, the Island of Misfit Toys inspired me to believe that all of my toys were imbued with a personality and a network of emotions. As soon as the show was over, I literally ran to my toy box and pulled out some of the toys with which I had not played for months—the Magic 8 Ball; the Weebles; the Etch a Sketch; the Rock’em Sock’em Robots; the G.I. Joe doll (who was missing an arm due to a grueling struggle with the family dog). When all of these toys were scattered before me, I proceeded to whisper to all of them the sentiments that were emerging from my 5-year-old heart. My whispers that evening sounded something like this: “None of you are misfit toys! I promise! You’re still special, even though you might not be as new as my other toys! Don’t be sad, ’cause you are the toys that came first!”

It was a memorable manifestation of the beautiful innocence of childhood.

It occurs to me that the birth of Jesus some two-thousand years ago was God’s mysterious and glorious way of whispering precisely that same message to all of humankind: “None of you are misfit toys, I promise! All of you are precious! All of you are worth ‘playing with’! I’ll never throw you away!”

Part of the good news of Christmas, in other words, is that each one of us matters to the One who created us, regardless of our size, shape, history, temperament, or situation in life. In fact, we matter to God so deeply that God would settle for nothing less than pouring the very best of divinity into a Bethlehem feeding trough for the sake of our salvation and redemption.

It comes down to this, I suppose: Christ came even for the Charlies in the Box and the spotted elephants. Because, in the Kingdom of God, there is no such thing as a misfit toy. I am deeply grateful for a place in that kind of toy box.

Not long ago, I visited a funeral home in order to pay my respects to the family of a nineteen-year-old young man who had been killed in an automobile accident that had been caused by a drunk driver. While I waited in line at the funeral home to see the family, I struck up a conversation with the man who was standing behind me in the line. When he discovered that I was a pastor, the conversation turned in a decidedly theological direction. “You know,” he said to me, “I don’t have much use for God.”

I found that to be an interesting phrase. He did not say that he had no belief in God. He said that he had no use for God, as though he found God to be perfectly disagreeable.

“May I ask why you have no use for God?”

“Because,” he answered, “God doesn’t seem to care that people in the world are suffering. He doesn’t seem to care that people are dying of hunger. He doesn’t seem to care that people are dying of cancer. He doesn’t seem to care that nineteen-year-old boys are being killed by drunk drivers.”

“I don’t have much use,” he said, “for a God that seems to get his jollies from sitting back and watching people suffer.”

Although this man’s words no doubt emerged from the profundity of his emotional pain, I cannot help but think that, in that moment, he was giving expression to a conceptualization of God that is frighteningly common, even among those who have not just experienced a tragic loss. The conceptualization of God to which I am making reference paints a portrait of a God who is unwaveringly remote, exasperatingly distant, and callously detached from the daily affairs of the world; a God who can never be reached or embraced but who demands to be appeased and satisfied by violent human suffering; a God who might have set things in motion, but who seemingly lacks either the ability or the desire to be in relationship with human souls; a divine but unsympathetic spectator who is unmoved by human suffering and who is far too blasé to act intentionally and redemptively on our behalf.

How honest will you permit me to be? Do I dare to tell you how frequently I have found myself harboring at least a shade of this very conceptualization in my deepest thoughts? Will you still permit me to minister alongside you if I confess to you that, more than once, I have found myself wondering out loud if God really cares about my little nook in the world?

The words of the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah spoke to my heart this morning during a few moments of prayerful meditation. Zephaniah’s prophetic ministry unfolded at least 630 (and perhaps over 700) years before the birth of Jesus against the backdrop of excruciatingly difficult days in Judah. Conquests and threats of conquest by surrounding powers. Political uncertainty. Fear of God’s judgment and wrath. A nagging penchant for bowing down before other gods. An impending time of exile that Zephaniah could see on the horizon. Dread concerning the future of Judah. These were the days in which Zephaniah and his people found themselves living.

Zephaniah does not sugarcoat his assessment of the situation:

You are a soiled and defiled city,” Zephaniah says to the people of Jerusalem. “You have not trusted in the Lord, you have not drawn near to your God. Your politicians are roaring lions, your judges are hungry wolves; your prophets are faithless; your priests have profaned that which is holy; your people have done violence to the law. (Zephaniah 3:1-4)

And yet, although Zephaniah speaks unsettlingly and trenchantly about the reality of the nation’s sin and God’s righteous judgment, he concludes his prophecy with a word of hope and restoration—a word that has been resonating in my heart since I read it this morning:

Sing aloud, O Jerusalem; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart! The Lord has taken away the judgments against you and has turned away your enemies. For the King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst. (Zephaniah 3:15)

Zephaniah felt so strongly about that last sentiment that he decided to repeat it two verses later, as though he desperately wanted people to remember it:

“The Lord, your God, is in your midst.”

Did you hear it? Zephaniah stubbornly refuses to allow his people to nurture a conceptualization of a distant and unfeeling God who has no emotional investment in the human pilgrimage. “No,” Zephaniah says, “our God is not like the expressionless and inanimate idols that our neighbors seem so eager to worship. Rather, our God is unsettlingly, passionately, personally, transformationally, and relentlessly IN OUR MIDST.”

Out of the bleakness of Judah’s ancient circumstances comes the redemptive truth about the steadfast “in the midst-ness” of our God—a truth that would not reach its complete fulfillment for another six centuries, when, in the fullness of time, the God of the universe stepped out of the landscape of eternity and came to us in swaddling clothes, so that God’s “in the midst-ness” might have some flesh and blood on it.

In a way, then, Zephaniah proclaimed the Christmas Good News centuries before Christmas. In a world that is so often eager to conceptualize God as being distant and remote, Zephaniah has the audacity to proclaim that God is in our midst. When we experience tragedy and suffering, when 19-year-old boys are killed by drunk drivers, when people we love are taken from us, when cancer seems to be having its way with someone about whom we care deeply, even then, the Lord is in our midst—not far off, but in our midst, hurting with us, weeping with us, experiencing our pain with us, but then restoring us to a condition of hope and strength and vision beyond our present circumstances. When we are discouraged with the state of the world, when we are heartbroken over human poverty and hunger and warfare, even then, the Lord is in our midst—not far off, but in our midst, aligning himself with those who are suffering and daring us to see his face in the disenfranchised and the marginalized. When we feel that we are without purpose and direction, even then, the Lord is in our midst—not far off, but in our midst, taking hold of our broken spirit and restoring it to a condition of wholeness.

Where is God? Zephaniah would have us to believe that we do not have to look very far. Because, according to Zephaniah, God stubbornly refuses to maintain a safe distance from us. In fact, God’s desire for relationship with human souls has inspired God to dwell in our very midst, closer to us than our own breathing, more intimately connected to us than our own private thoughts. I don’t know what you call that. I call it Christmas Good News.

Several years ago, I happened to be visiting a patient at St. Clair Hospital moments after he had received the results of a recent biopsy. The results indicated that he had a cancerous tumor on his kidney. His heart was heavy with that news. “Eric,” he said, “I need you to help me to sing something.”

“Uh, OK. Well…uh…hmmmm…what do you want to sing?”

“It’s one of my favorite choruses,” he said.

“Fine. Just tell me what it is and we’ll sing it.”

A moment later, the two of us joined together in singing these words:

Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place
I can feel his mighty power and his grace
I can hear the brush of angels wings, I see glory on each face
Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place

After we were finished singing, I could not prevent myself from asking a question: “Roger, why was it so important to you that we sing that particular song?”

“Because,” he said, “I needed to sing something that would remind me that the presence of God is a whole lot closer to my soul than those cancer cells are.”

What was it that that man was calling for? He was calling for a reminder of Zephaniah’s prophecy. He was calling for a reiteration of the Christmas Good News that the Lord is in our midst, even in the aftermath of a cancer diagnosis.

He was calling, in other words, for the truth about God.

Aren’t we all?

“Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers…Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” (Romans 13:11-12)

One of the more important processes that every single one of us experiences every single day is this: We wake up.

It is one of the great equalizers, isn’t it? No matter one’s income, personality, age, gender, or political affiliation, one’s experience of a new day is dependent upon his or her accommodation this regular process—the process of waking up from sleep.

It should be acknowledged that all of us wake up in different ways, depending, of course, on one’s particular routine and temperament. Some people wake up to a blaring alarm clock, others to the gentle sounds of soft music. Some people wake up to an internal alarm, a mysterious mechanism within their biological network that brings them to consciousness without any external assistance whatsoever.

Some people wake up easily and quickly. As soon as their eyes open, they hop out of bed with a palpable eagerness, excited about beginning their day. “Bring me the newspaper, bring me my coffee, bring me my fruit loops, I’m ready to go.” Other people wake up slowly and rather reluctantly, pulling a distorted face out of the congealed drool that has bonded head to pillow for the last eight hours; stumbling and grumbling all the way to the bathroom; tripping over the dog on route to shutting off the alarm that is placed intentionally on the other side of the room because of the physical movement that such a placement demands.

We all have different routines, you see. But at the heart of each routine is the simple practice of waking up. All of us have to do it. In fact, you are reading this post only because, at some point today, you saw fit to wake up.

One of the key components in the process of waking up is the task of what might be described as laying aside the darkness. Darkness, after all, is an important part of sleeping. Even if it is light outside, the closing of one’s eyes in sleep produces a condition of darkness, and it is a darkness to which one grows quickly accustomed. Part of waking up is accepting the illumination that will bring us out of the darkness of sleep and into the light of an awakened condition.

But that is not always a comfortable thing, especially if it is still dark outside when the waking occurs. We turn on that light that for some reason seems ten times brighter than it normally does. We shield ourselves from it as though we are being confronted by a radioactive bombardment. Sometimes we even curse the light because it is so painful to our eyes. But we know that we must have it. We know that the light coming on is portion of waking up. Because only then can we lay aside the darkness. Only then can we be certain that we are stepping where we need to be stepping and seeing what we need to be seeing.

I bring all of these realities to mind because they are at the heart of the scripture upon which I meditated this morning (Romans 13:11-14). It is a scripture in which the Apostle Paul essentially says to the Roman church and to us, “Hey, church, wake up! Wake up, and lay aside the darkness!”

The people to whom Paul was writing in the Roman Church would not have had alarm clocks. They would not have had light switches. But they would have been confronted with the same daily process that confronts us: the process of waking up and laying aside the darkness. Therefore, the Paul’s words would have called to mind an everyday reality that would have been as familiar to the Roman Christians as it is to us.

“You know what time it is,” Paul writes in the scripture. (Interestingly, the “time” to which Paul refers here is “kairos” time, not “chronos” time. It is not measurable and chronological time that Paul is describing. Rather, it is freighted time—time pregnant with mystical urgency and messianic significance.)

“You know what time it is,” Paul writes, “it is kairos time! It is a moment in which you are to pay attention, a moment in which you are to wake from sleep.” Why? “Because,” Paul continues, “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers.”

Paul’s description of the nearness of salvation here is no doubt a reference to Christ’s triumphant return, which, with every passing day, is indeed nearer to us than it was the day before. Paul’s language also calls to mind the fragility of the human condition and, more specifically, the perpetual nearness of a physical death that will one day bring us face to face with the One who saves us.

“You know what time it is. It is time to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”

In this stark and unsettling moment of Scripture, Paul utilizes the everyday reality of waking from sleep as a metaphor for an attentive and vibrant discipleship. “Do you really want to be a follower of Jesus,” Paul essentially asks in this scripture. “Do you really want to live a life that is subordinated to his Lordship? Well then, spiritually speaking, wake up! Stop living like a spiritual somnambulist—sleepwalking from worship service to worship service, church meeting to church meeting, while giving little or no attention to the transforming presence of the living Christ in our midst.”

“Wake up,” Paul writes. “Live a life of alertness and spiritual attentiveness. Sense the urgency of the moment. Respect the fleeting nature of time. Live in such a way that you are completely awake for the kingdom of God and the ministry of that kingdom in the world.”

“Wake up,” Paul writes, “and lay aside any sinful works of darkness that are engendering a condition of sluggish indifference toward the things of God, because time is short.”

I had a conversation recently with a woman who told me that, each week, before she walks into her church building for worship, she sits in her car in the parking lot for a few minutes, and she prays a prayer that goes something like this: “Lord God, take away my pettiness; take away my mean-spiritedness; take away my self-centeredness; and take away any small-mindedness that would cause me to believe that worship is more about spiritual self-gratification than it is about offering the entirety of myself to you.”

What is that woman doing when she prays that prayer each week? The scripture from Romans provides a new vocabulary with which to answer that question. Each week in her automobile, that woman is spending a few minutes laying aside her personal works of darkness that she might be awakened to the living presence of the God she is about to worship. Each week in her automobile, in other words, that woman is waking up.

A man I know recently began to volunteer at Washington City Mission. In fact, his entire family is joining him in that volunteer ministry. “We had to do it,” he said to me. “We had to get ourselves into some hands on, face to face ministry for the sake of Jesus Christ. As a family, we had become drowsy in the comfortableness of our lifestyle. We all needed to be shaken up by some kind of new ministry that would take us beyond the stifling normalcy of what our lives had become.”

What are those family members doing when they spend hours each weekend working with the homeless? Some might say that they are simply appeasing their suburban guilt. But I say something different. I say that they are laying aside their personal works of darkness that they might be awakened to the living presence of the One who is the light of the world and whose light shines with particular brightness in the faces and lives of the poor and marginalized. That family, in other words, is waking up.

I don’t know how you look upon the season of Advent. I look upon it as a season in which to wake up. Therein, I suppose, lies the significance of the mystical rhythms of the liturgical calendar. A season like Advent brings to the church’s people a unique opportunity to open their spiritual eyes and to come out of their drowsiness, so that, by the time Christmas arrives, their hearts are receptive to Jesus, the Light of the world, who comes to us afresh.

I want to be available to him this Advent. I want to lay aside in repentance whatever works of darkness are preventing him from having complete access to my life. In short, I want to wake up.

Difficult as it might be to believe, we are about to enter the season of Advent. The word “advent” is a derivative of a Latin word, “adventus,” which means “coming”. During the four week season of Advent, Christian people prepare themselves for Christmas by centering themselves in the truth that the God of the Ages is a “coming” or “advent-ing” God—a God who CAME to us long ago on that first Christmas night; a God who COMES to us even now through the continuing work of the Holy Spirit; and a God who WILL COME to us one day in the future, when Christ returns for the purpose of completing the Kingdom that he inaugurated through his life, death, and resurrection.

Even as I type these words, I am praying for a prayer for my experience of this Advent season. My prayer sounds something like this:

This Advent, I pray that I will become a little bit like Mary, the peasant girl who made herself available to the strange and life-altering purposes of God. Mary was obedient to God’s disruptive calling upon her life. How might I become more Mary-like this Advent in my sacrificial obedience to God?

This Advent, I pray that I will become a little bit like Joseph, the carpenter who took Mary as his wife even though he did not comprehend all the details of her pregnancy. Joseph trusted in God in spite of his lack of a complete understanding of God’s providential plan. How might I become more Joseph-like this Advent in my trustful reliance upon God, even when I lack a complete understanding of the circumstances that surround me?

This Advent, I pray that I will become a little bit like John, the prophetic soul who baptized people in the wilderness and who preached about the urgency of repentance. John made clear that authentic repentance is the only condition that enables a human heart to accommodate the presence of the coming Savior. How might I become more John-like this Advent in my personal repentance and in my desire to turn away from anything that would compromise the integrity of my discipleship?

This Advent, I pray that I will become a little bit like the shepherds, who left behind their important work in the fields in order to see what was happening in Bethlehem. The shepherds allowed their lives to be interrupted by the activity of God. They left their familiar surroundings for the purpose of glimpsing the holiness of God’s revelation. How might I become more shepherd-like this Advent in my willingness to be interrupted by God’s revelations? How might I step outside of some of this season’s busy routines in order to experience the in-breaking presence of God?

This Advent, I pray that I will become a little bit like the angels, whose joyful outbursts echoed through the sky on that first Christmas night. The angels’ eagerness to adore God bears witness to the urgency of worshipful praise. How might I become more angel-like this Advent in my worship and adoration of God? How might I become more faithful in my rendering of praise to the One whose majesty and glory demand nothing less than my wholehearted celebration?

This Advent, perhaps most of all, I pray that I will become a little bit like Jesus, whose entrance into human history is the incarnation of God’s radical and far-reaching love for humankind. How might I become more Christ-like this Advent in my loving and outreach? How might I incarnate the love of God in new and creative ways for the sake of my family, my friends, my neighbors, my co-workers, and my congregation?

I know from personal experience that, if I am not intentional in my spiritual focus, the days of this holy season may very well slip by me unnoticed. I am committed to not allowing that to happen. I am endeavoring to make this Advent into a season of fervent prayer, quiet listening, joyful worship, counter-cultural obedience, and incarnational love. I am doing everything I can to allow the days of Advent to become a transformational personal journey into the spiritual likeness of the different characters of the Christmas story. That way, when Christmas comes, I will be able to approach the manger rightly, eager to welcome the Christ who comes to us once again.