The Feast of the Nativity

This is the outside of a centuries-old church.

The walls are clearly worn and scarred from both war and weather. It looks very much like the buildings that surround it. In fact, walking close enough to the wall, you probably wouldn’t even know you were walking next to a church.

Here is the inside of the same church.

Pretty, isn’t it? Not overdone, and clearly not as beautiful as some of the more modern churches we’re used to seeing. There is, however, a simple, serene, subtle beauty to it.

This is The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem which, by tradition, sits on the very spot our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born. As you can see, it is nothing we would expect from something connected with Christmas. It is not flashy. There are no blinking lights or pine trees or silver and gold tinsel. It does not focus on the worldly celebration of Christmas. There are no trumpets proclaiming the birth of Christ. None of the usual signs and symbols we would associate with how mankind celebrates Christmas are here. Instead, the focus is on the story told by St. Luke of how the heavens proclaimed His birth. There are angels and candlelight. A large star marks the precise place where it is believed Christ was born.

Even the name of the church is revealing. This is not the Church of Christmas. It is the Church of the Nativity. This is not a church of the way of the world. It is a Church of the way of the Lord.

So, as we make our way through the next week, my wish for you is this. Amid all the hustle and bustle, amid all of the chaos and insanity of Christmas, may you find an appropriate way to celebrate the simple, serene, and subtle feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Christ is Born! Glorify Him!

Political Observation

According to liberals, leaving Afghanistan before the job was completed was a mistake, and staying in Iraq until the job is done is a mistake.

Your Best Life Now

If you've been to a book store any time in the last several years, you have seen a book titled Your Best Life Now, written by an evangelical pastor who, I'm sure, had very good intentions when he wrote it. Now, I have not read the book, nor do I intend to, but I can say firmly that I can't stand the title of the book nor its jacket-cover description. If there is one thing that I believe as a Christian, it's this: my best life is not now. My hope and belief is that my best life is yet to come; specifically, it will come in the life after my death. There seems to be a continual push in pop-psych Christianity that God wants us to be happy, He wants us to be rich, and He wants us to have all of the good things of this life. Scripture is quoted, and everyone feels justified not only in pursuing wealth, but in pursuing it on their terms, because God spoke to them through the previously mentioned Scripture passage. Now don't get me wrong, if God intends for me to be rich, that's fine by me; however, I firmly believe that if He blesses me with material riches, then those riches are to be used for purposes that He will show me, not for the purposes of living my best life now. I will try to live on what I need and not on what I want, and give the rest to those who have needs that are not being met.

However, the real problem is the interpretation of "being rich". Let's be honest here: by the generally accepted interpretation of being rich, none of the apostles were rich, Paul was not rich, Mary was not rich...in fact, lots of the saints were not rich. Or were they. If we interpret the phrase "being rich" as "being spiritually rich", then all of the saints were rich. A lot of good people in this life, people that I respect and admire, are rich beyond belief. Of course, being spiritually rich doesn't sell in our materialistic culture, so those who know that this is what Christ really meant, and those who don't, ignore the true interpretation for the sake of being heard by thousands every Sunday morning and selling each one of them a book. Even so, the reality remains the same. No matter how spiritually rich I am in this life, it is nothing compared to the riches that await in the next. And more importantly, the riches both here and there are nothing I have earned. Nothing I have done could possibly be deserving of those riches. It is all a gift, a gift of which I am unworthy but have been offered anyway. What I need to focus on is being as prepared as possible to receive all of the gifts that God has in store for me, both now and then, humbly and gratefully.

Everywhere Present...

Ask anyone who is involved with higher-level mathematics, and I guarantee one of their least favorite phases will be, “The rest of the proof is left to the reader.” For those of you not involved with higher-level mathematics, this little phrase gets used a lot in textbooks where the author believes that either (a) the rest of the proof of the theorem at hand is obvious and he shouldn’t have to spell the rest of it out for you, or (b) the rest of the proof is excruciatingly tedious and he is lazy. Either way, “the rest of the proof” can be an incredibly painful and humbling experience, especially if you are trying to use the textbook to learn the material for the first time.

Now I am a firm believer that God is “everywhere present and fills all things.” However, it occurred to me that, above all else, God might just be a mathematician at heart...and a really good one at that. In fact, the more mathematics I learn, the more I am convinced that God is both the Mathematician and the Mathematics. Note the following facts:

-Mathematicians are very adept as presenting a large amount of material cryptically encoded in symbols.
-To understand the known, “deep” results of mathematics requires a lot of attention to detail, oftentimes with easy-to-understand pieces put together in creative ways producing something entirely new.
-Mathematics is unfailingly logical, regardless of whether or not you are able to follow the logic.
-The unknown results of mathematics are already accomplished. They are simply undiscovered facts rather than uncreated realities.
-No matter how much mathematics you know, there is always more to learn.

Mathematics is, at its heart, the study of patterns. It is the quest of the mathematician to find the patterns in the results of clinical trials, in encrypted messages intercepted from foreign spies, or in zero-divisor graphs, no matter how chaotic or random the results of countless examples may appear to be. And the really good mathematicians can not only find the patterns, they can create countless examples of them.

The Mathematician has written His textbook. Anyone with the patience for it is invited to study and learn. But be advised: some of the “proofs” are left to the reader.