Devotion: The Holiday Cleanup

There is something about that final step in the holidays: the cleanup. I was reminded of one Christmas growing up, when my father, who was always eager to throw the wrapping paper into our fireplace, accidentally tossed out a pair of pearl earrings they had given my sister.

It took about two days to realize that the earrings were missing, and so they began sifting through the ash of our fireplace looking and hoping in vain that they might be able to recover the earrings. They never could find the earrings in the midst of all the soot and grime. To this day, there remains an uneasiness within our house that our haste to cleanup from the holidays may mean that we toss out an important gift.

With all of the holiday cheer, best wishes and merry Christmas’s we sung before December 25th, it is understandable that there would be a natural “holiday let-down” come the 26th. Work beckons us back; family responsibilities begin again. However, if we are not careful, like that earring, we can easily discard the gift of Christmas as we try to reorganize our lives for the New Year.

The challenge for us is to find a way to incorporate the magic of Christmas on a cold and lonely day in March or on a busy day in August. Since we claim to worship a living and active God who breaks into our lives now just as he did in the Bethlehem manger, we should be cautious not to put the holidays behind us, but rather to be taking the warmth, generosity and cheer of Christmas into our ordinary experiences.

Like the earrings buried deep among the ashes of discarded wrapping paper, how have we, in our haste to move forward, failed to be attune to the ways in which God’s gift of Jesus Christ has and will continue to transform our lives?

Great Commercial

Bragging time

I just wanted to post this photo of Lindsay and Ellie,

and I finally put together the video of Ellie's first attempts at crawling. Looking at this footage filmed on Halloween night, it is amazing how quickly (and fast) she has taken to crawling. If I blink she is in the other room pulling up on the hard, sharp brick hearth we own.

Devotion: A Extraordinarily Ordinary Christmas

An extraordinarily ordinary Christmas

A few weeks ago, Lindsay, Ellie and I got to play Mary, Joseph and Jesus at the church. During this event, I read to the children the Christmas Story, which was adapted from Luke’s Gospel.
As I read the story, I started to laugh to myself because of how simple the story was, and then I went to my Bible to see if that is really how the birth of Jesus is fully recorded. This is how Luke retells the birth of Jesus: “While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son…” (Luke 2:6-7).
After Lindsay and I had Ellie we would bore any poor soul who would listen to us talk about the nervous excitement we had that morning, the drive to the hospital and the whole experience of Ellie coming into this world. Yet Luke’s retelling of Christ’s birth is simply: “It was time, she gave birth…;” An odd way to describe the central event to the Incarnation.
One has to wonder why the story of a birth, especially the birth of Jesus, would not try to describe a fuller picture of the event. What was the manger like? What was Joseph thinking? Did they wonder if the angel would be right and that this would be a boy? Was Mary afraid? Were the sheep “baaing” and the cows “mooing” or were they reverently silent? How can the birth of Jesus Christ--“God with Us”-- be summed up in three Greek words?
Personally, I believe that in the Gospel account God had a distinct purpose. The story is setting the stage for the transformative event that is about to occur. Jesus’ birth into the world was like a pebble going into a lake. It was unnoticeable at first, but it began a huge ripple effect as God emerged from the manger in Bethlehem and began heading towards the cross.
We must remember that God choose to break into our human existence not with a bang and a bolt of lightening, but with the powerfully weak cry of a new born baby. It was a plain and ordinary event with extraordinary results.
It is my prayer that this Christmas weekend, you would be able reflect upon how the small phrase “she gave birth to a son” has radically transformed your life and the entire world.

Merry Christmas,
Rev. Wes Barry

iPride

After posting about Battlecry, I thought I would go check out their website...
Below I have cut and pasted these teenagers quotes:

"Religious Tradition has taken over there spirit and it's my job to help break that in Jesus name and I speak LIFE and Freedom into them and I say awake, awake o sleeping giant, and follow God's will!"
"I am here to speak out. God is going to speak through me in very dramatic, and life changing ways. "
"I will fight to save my generation with all that i have, leaving no one behind. I will rally other soldiers to help build the army that WILL take back the 96 percent."

This scares the crap out of me...not really because of the war images (though that should as well). Mainly because every quote started with "I." Each statement has a sense of grandeur and wanting to be the next big thing.

I fall into this trap very easily as well; When ministry becomes focused on me and God becomes merely a vehicle to self-promotion.

This attitude of using God, so that "I" may accomplish great things is not only what these teenagers are expressing, but it is what many of us are thinking as we desire successful numbers, successful worship attendance and successful ministries. We wrongly prioritize our goals such that it makes us feel that same sort of grandeur.

Miles Finch writes,

"When our goal of worship is to receive God's help to be successful, pride is taking over. Then we are just using God to further ourselves. Could it be that we want church-growth secrets, or even God's Spirit...for the wrong reasons? Have we slipped into a proud and competitive mode? Is this part of the reason why the American church seems so crippled right now?"

To read this full article it is in the spring 2007 Leadership Journal entitled "Surprised by Pride." He also quotes CS Lewis:

"Pride gets no joy out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever or good looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others...It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest."

God's Warriors

CNN Presents repeated an interesting episode last night where the examined the impact of Evangelical Christianity on politics. Some of the clips were disturbing to see how evangelism is equated with being against something (e.g. abortion) rather than "good news." Two of the more interesting segments were about Cizik and Greg Boyd.
They both articulated well the desire for the church to stop being narrowly defined by particular agendas and trying to broaden the message of God's good news for all people. Cizik has been lambasted for daring to suggest that the Evangelical church should be add Creation Care to its concerns. Boyd has been labeled a heretic for arguing that American and Christian are not, nor should not be synonyms.

One of the best lines from the episode was that if we are going to be pro-life we need to be pro-all-of-life and therefore should be concerned with the poor and the broken as much as we worried about the unborn child.

And one of the strangest interactions, where you could see Amanpour's cyncism come out was this exchange with Ron Luce, a teen minister of BattlyCry and Teen Mania:

AMANPOUR: When I, you know, read that women have to wear skirts of a certain length and guys aren’t allowed to, you know, go on the Internet unsupervised, and I think, you know, totalitarian regimes.
LUCE: No. It’s about learning to have disciplines that communicate purity. You know? The skirts’ lengths are to keep guys from – you know, any man on the planet can be distracted. And we don’t want to unintentionally create distraction.
AMANPOUR: But, Ron, that’s what the Taliban said. They kept woman in their house, because men couldn’t be trusted around them.

Poor Luce had this look like "what the hell? that was not on the prep sheet."

Devotion: A Christmas Carol?

A Christmas Carol



In the Gospel of Luke, Mary sings about God: “His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty …”

These lyrics do not really seem to fit with the cuddly baby Jesus that many of our nativity scenes depict. Mary, pregnant with her son, anticipates that God will bring the proud, the rulers and the rich down. The first Christmas was not the time of excess, indulgence and extravagance that we often now expect; rather it was a time of transformation.

A time when God, the creator of all things, humbled himself and took on human flesh. This is more than a birthday celebration; this is a celebration of a historical, social, and spiritual transformation. The old order has gone, and a new order is breaking into our lives in the lowliest and most unexpected ways…a baby.

As we anticipate the birth of Christ this year, what are the ways in which you are experiencing God’s transformative love? Where have you seen God restoring the broken? Filling the hungry? It is my hope that as we draw near to that silent night in Bethlehem, we may recognize God’s work in our lives and the world around us.



Peace and Blessings,
Rev. Wes Barry

Rev

Last Sunday, I was ordained into the PC(USA). As a good friend put it, "it's about time." Or as a high school friend said, "Wow, it is awesome that you have been able to pursue your dreams."

Being able to go back to Atlanta in order to celebrate (er...worship) was an awesome experience. As I kneeled on the floor in front of the communion table of FPC-Atlanta, I was taken back to my Junior year of high school when I knelt on the same floor. The tile was just as uncomfortable then as it was now.

I recalled standing behind the pulpit by Senior of year of high school to preach my first sermon...about Peter getting out of the boat and taking a risk by walking on water.

As my father and mother came forward to present me with the robe and stole (yes, I have been called to place where robes are required, God has a good sense of humor), I was thinking about how much I loathed sitting on the front row of the balcony. As much as I laugh about my lack of involvement in the church growing up, I realized that this place had a tremendous impact on my faith. I was baptized there (though at 8 years old), I attended Sunday School (though only on the Sundays I had to bring Donuts and juice), I was involved with the youth fellowship and multiple mission trips. My freshman year I was invited by a blonde sophmore girl to help serve the homeless breakfast...how could I say no.

To then be able to stand before these people in order to express my calling into the ministry was a tremendous blessing. It was much more a recognition of how these people had prepared the way for me.