Holiday Afterword

With yesterday's feast of the Lord's Baptism, another Christmas season has come to its end as all good things in this world must do sooner or later. In the next few days, the church's Christmas Tree will be sent to recycling and the creche will be stored away for another year. (In many more traditionally Catholic countries, the creche stays up until Candlemas Day. Thus, in Rome two years ago, I was able to visit many a pesebre in church after church up until the beginning of February.)

In my teens, I knew someone whose family left their Christmas Tree up - presumably in a minimally heated part of the house - until mid-March. I can appreciate the impulse to keep Christmas going the entire winter, but that seems somewhat impractical for most people. And perhaps it maybe misses part of the point of having a holiday like Christmas. It seems to me to be in the very nature of festivity that it is limited to a set time, different from the rest of the time, different from "ordinary" time. For holidays to be truly special, they must be exceptional. Christmas comes but once a year, so the saying goes. And that's precisely why it is so special, so precious, such a treasure to be looked forward to with new enthusiasm each year and kept in remembrance afterwards.

Christmas is our annual break from those ordinary routines that define our ordinary time. But those routines are the who, what, when, where, and how of human living. And, properly understood and faithfully celebrated, Christmas can continue to inform those regular routines of our ordinary time. Obviously, one can't give gifts every day or host holiday celebrations on a daily basis. But Christmas properly understood and faithfully celebrated is a means by which joy and hope, generosity and authentic outreach, may be effectively internalized - thus re-defining, so to speak, even our "ordinary" time. That, after all, was the lesson one special Christmas taught Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge. His holiday afterword transformed his entire life and also remade the world around him

And isn't that the ultimate point of the incarnation?

Beloved

Last Sunday, the Church celebrated the Epiphany of the Lord, one of the oldest and greatest festivals in the Christian calendar. Of course, the way we celebrate Epiphany nowadays, one could easily miss its importance. Epiphany is sometimes called “Little Christmas,” which y makes it like a very junior member of the Christmas family even though Epiphany is actually older than Christmas. It is also commonly called “Three Kings Day,” correctly highlighting the story of the Magi but ignoring what happened after. In fact, in the Eastern Churches the story of the Magi is read on Christmas Day, and Epiphany highlights the Baptism of the Jesus by John. we in the West divide our emphases differently, remembering the Magi on Epiphany and Jesus’ Baptism on the following Sunday.

So what? One might ask!  In the United States today, Christmas, after going on almost non-stop since Halloween, has finally fizzled out, making all this Epiphany and Baptism business seem like at most some vestigial post-Christmas afterthought. But, if we shift gears and allow ourselves to think the way the Church thinks about these things, then we see that today’s remembrance of Jesus’ baptism is actually the event that Advent and Christmas have been leading up to. Today we fast-forward from Bethlehem to an adult Jesus, about to begin his public life, the work he came into the world to do, the long-term point of the Christmas story.

Jesus’ baptism by John is mentioned in three of the four gospels and alluded to in the fourth. And, as we just heard, it was referred to by Peter in the Acts of the Apostles on the occasion of the baptism of the first pagan converts, Cornelius, the Roman soldier, and his household. So it was obviously well remembered and had obviously left an impression. Peter treats Jesus’ baptism as the starting-point of the Jesus story – how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, after which Jesus went about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.

John’s baptism had been a ritual of repentance, dramatizing one’s need for conversion and one’s willingness to start anew, as their ancestors had when they had first passed through the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. By being baptized by John, Jesus blended into the mass of anonymous sinners that we are. By being baptized as one of us, Jesus joined us - which was, of course, the point of his becoming human and being born in the first place.

Jesus joined us in the water, but when he came up from the water, we are told, behold, the heavens were opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Not just Jesus alone but the whole Trinity joined in to reveal who Jesus is. Jesus began his work in the world by being officially identified by his Father as his Son, anointed, as Saint Peter put in today’s 2^nd reading, with the Holy Spirit and power, thus setting the stage for the rest of the story of Jesus life and mission in our world.

And not just Jesus’ story, but ours too! Not Jesus’s life and mission, but ours too! Thanks to Jesus, we too – like Cornelius – have become acceptable to God, for Jesus has shared the Holy Spirit with us. Through his gift of the Holy Spirit, we have been empowered to profess our faith in Jesus as God’s Son and to join ourselves with him so as to share in his relationship with his Father. Jesus’ baptism anticipates the baptism that elevates each of us to a new relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit and empowers us to continue Christ’s life and mission in our world through our membership in his Church.

Jesus, the beloved Son, has made us beloved sons and daughters of his Father. But being beloved is a challenge as well as an opportunity. Having let us in on his story, on who he is and the total trajectory of his life, Jesus’ baptism challenges us to identify with that trajectory and to recognize the intended trajectory of our own lives and to respond accordingly.

Homily for the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, January 12, 2014.

Scandal

How the media loves political/celebrity scandals! And once again the political class seems destined to oblige! Mis-identifying a Croat as a Serb would seem bad enough (in the centennial year of Sarajevo no less!) But if NJ Governor Christie's political staffers or political appointees actually did deliberately cause that serious traffic jam at the George Washington Bridge in order to punish Fort Lee's mayor for not endorsing the Republican Governor for re-election, that's serious (suffix "-gate"worthy) stuff. Or maybe it was to punish some State Senator? Who knows now how many minor NJ politicians may earn their 15 minutes of national fame from this bizarre episode?

More importantly, what possesses appointed political hacks to attempt such stunts? The Watergate burglars back in June 1972 may have thought they could get away with it. But what planet does one have to be on to think that one can get way with such things today - especially after leaving an email trail for everyone to follow? It certainly says something about the tone-deaf, closed-in-on-itself "bubble" in which so much of the political class operates that one could seriously concoct such a scheme and somehow expect to get away with it!

Above and beyond the sheer stupidity of it all, there is the audacious disregard for the public good displayed by such supposed public servants. It was after all the general public who were the actual victims of this action. Of course, our post modern culture disdains moral absolutes. So the imperative that public servants should serve the common good is perhaps less self-evident than it used to be!

The Governor rightly resents being so ill-served by his people. Perhaps, however, he would do well to wonder what might lead staffers to think such actions appropriate in the first place. Such scandals do have a way of revealing more than initially meets the eye. Again Watergate is the perfectly illustrative example. 

In the end, the "third-rate" Watergate burglary became the defining event of the Nixon presidency because at some fundamental level it seemed true to type, that is it seemed to exemplify what that administration was really like, what it was all about at its core. Only time will tell whether this sad scandal says something significantly telling about the Governor or his Administration or his party. But it has already said a lot about the wider moral universe in which our political elites increasingly operate.

Atheist "Sunday Assemblies"

On NPR's Morning Edition the other day, I listened to a fascinating report on the growth of Atheist "Sunday Assemblies." A "Sunday Assembly" is a church-like experience for those who don't believe in God. The movement was started in the U.K. by two British comedians,
Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, and now has some 30 chapters around the world. "There are loads of people out there who want to live better, help often and wonder more," according to co-founder Sanderson Jones. "It's all the best bits of church, but with no religion and awesome pop songs," adds the other co-founder Pippa Evans.

It's a light-hearted approach to non-religious religion that is actually somewhat serious in attempting to provide people whom Phil Zuckerman, who teaches secularism at a southern California college, calls "optimistic atheists." By that Zuckerman means those who have some positive association with religion and church that they would like to retain even in their unbelief. "They miss the community, they miss the music, they miss the multigenerational coming together with people that you might not otherwise be hanging out with," Zuckerman says.
If nothing else, this seems to highlight the reality that religious impulses remain deeply embedded in people and are hard to shake off. The "spiritual but not religious" syndrome has always suffered from two fundamental lacks - the lack, obviously, of God, but also the lack of authentic human community. Atheist "Sunday Assemblies" apparently aim to fill that second void. Their existence testifies not only to religion's continued relevance in relation to fundamental human needs - in this case responding to the sadness of living and being alone in the world - but also to post-modern secular society's failure to fulfill those fundamental communitarian needs.

My guess is that "Sunday Assemblies" - like Ethical Culture for an earlier generation - will appeal to a fairly narrow niche market. Most non-religious people will probably happily settle for Sunday Brunch, sports, or some other leisure activity in place of church.  "Sunday Assemblies" - again like Ethical Culture - just seem too much like what they aim to replace to appeal to those who have lost (or never had) religion. That they tap into a real human need just suggests that post-modern secular society will likely continue to fail at fulfilling that need.

For the original NPR news story, go to: http://www.npr.org/2014/01/07/260184473/sunday-assembly-a-church-for-the-godless-picks-up-steam

The War on Poverty +50

50 years ago today, in his first State of the Union Address, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an "unconditional war on poverty." In poverty, Johnson recognized "a domestic enemy which threatens the strength of our nation and the welfare of our people." Unlike World War II, which was the model war for LBJ's generation, our more recent wars have been much more inconclusive. Such was certainly the case with the War on Poverty. In any case, here we are, 50 years later, and the big topic is - increasing inequality.

The statistics are familiar, depressingly so. In the past, the inequality and lack of mobility often associated with many "third world" countries were blamed (by both Marxists and free-marketers) on their lack of economic development, i.e., the pre-capitalist character of their economies. What, however, is one to make of inequality and lack of mobility in a country where capitalism reigns triumphant? For those on the "right," the answer seems to be even more capitalism, while those on the "left" seem finally to be rediscovering the issue.

Certainly it is refreshing to see the Left rediscover the issue of inequality. Once upon a time, social and economic justice was primarily what the Left purported to be about. In recent decades, however, liberal enthusiasm has increasingly focused on identity and lifestyle issues - issues somewhat more salient to privileged cultural elites than the concerns of those with whom such elites have less and less contact and with whom they share less and less of a common culture.

To be sure, the Rights's priority of tax cuts and other privileges for the rich, along with our diminished public commitment to education, the decline of private-sector unions, and (most telling of all) globalization and the consequent lack of opportunities to support oneself and a family through blue-collar jobs, all these are certainly serious contributors to our contemporary crisis. But so is the collapse of family and community life - thanks in large part, of course, to capitalism's "creative destruction," but thanks also to the social and cultural transformation associated with our contemporary progressive revolution in morals. The result is a society in which less than half of working class adults in their 30s and 40s are married. This growing social and cultural disconnection and dysfunction has especially impacted working class males. 

Thus, Notre Dame's Michael Jindra, writing for the Institute for Family Studies, argues: "early reliance on stimulating entertainment, lower educational attainment, disconnection from families and role models, and the attractions of different, 'edgy' subcultures - contribute to a widening gulf between those more connected to family, work, and society, and those without these commitments" ("Why Working-Class Men Are Falling Behind," IFS, January 2, 2014).

As right and left elites increasingly have less in common with the rest of society, right elites focus on libertarian policies that increase the wealth of those at the top, while left elites pursue a comparable libertarianism in the cultural and moral sphere. Both result in the weakening of the very social structures and institutions and relationships which support authentic communities.

Meanwhile the disparity increases between those at the very top of the American economic pyramid and everyone else - truly today's "domestic enemy which threatens the strength of our nation and the welfare of our people."