The Problem With Puppies
Each week one of our local news outlets has a humane society pet segment to show some of the animals waiting for adoption. My favorite is when they bring in two or three puppies and try to corral them on the desk.
Who doesn’t love a cute, energetic, stumbling and licking, razor-toothed puppy? One time I remember sitting on the floor and being enveloped by a swarm of retriever pups and it was pure joy as the troop came on me like I was a ham sandwich.
The trouble is that puppies don’t stay small and cute. They grow and sometimes take on traits we might like less than when they were small.
Small is controllable. Small fits. Small is…small.
Friends of ours share their house with two giant Schnauzers. They started out as tiny two-hand sized fur balls but now each is well over 100# and kind of take over the joint and can be sometimes overly friendly. Our friends love them and we enjoy the pair when we visit and are glad they aren’t ours.
In a similar way, who doesn’t love a nativity scene complete with Joseph and Mary and the baby Jesus in a little hay-lined feed trough, surrounded by animals, shepherds and wise men; you know the scene. We have a set like that carefully arranged on our mantle, made of some kind of porcelain, thus fragile and mostly off limits to a meathead like me. A still-life imagined depiction of a world altering scene.
Remember the movie Talledega Nights? NASCAR racer Ricky Bobby lived a wildly undisciplined life but loved the “baby Jesus.” Nothing more than a cute add-on to a self-determined way of living. No mention of the grown-up Jesus and his message. Keeping the baby Jesus a baby matched his wants just right.
Like with puppies, the problem with an infant Jesus in the manger is that he grew up. No longer controllable and small, he had an agenda that may not fit how others, then and now, imagined him having. We like the baby Jesus because he’s…a baby: small, dependent, and as long as he’s fed and changed he’s manageable. Once grown, all that changes.
It’s all good until he talks about the kingdom he will establish, an upside-down one where the littlest are the greatest and the big shots will be humbled. He hangs out with a rag-tag crew and society’s outcasts and says if we follow him we will do likewise. In a talk on a hillside where he lays out some of the details of this kingdom, it sounds almost crazy in its radical implications. Upsetting the religious apple cart appears to be a regular on his daily to-do list.
No longer small. Anything but controllable. Controversial. Culturally swimming upstream. Compassionately confident. Undeniably attractive.
The babe in the manger grew up to be the man we needed, just not who we expected. Jesus was routinely wild and untamable, rarely acting in line with expectations, both then and now. Think about it…
We want a warrior, but he teaches us to turn the other cheek.
We desire to win and control culture, but he shows us how to serve and subversively do good.
We want a lion, but he comes as a lamb.
We look for a king who rules, but he willingly dies at the hands of an empire.
From the beginning of the church, folks have made attempts to pour Jesus into the mold of their desires, and maybe we all do that to some extent. No matter how well-intentioned, these all end in some amount of failure because his being a means to our ends doesn’t match up with his kingdom. It makes much more sense to take what he says at face value and fold that into our world, rather than paste his picture onto our plan. More sense…more difficult.
Historically, to work out the faith-in-life with adult Jesus question, folks generally have taken one of two paths.
Retreat into holy enclaves, cut off from the evils of the world, or
Attempt to form a kind of theocracy and force the larger culture into our vision of a Christian nation/state/city.
Neither option will serve us well as his followers. It’s not difficult to hear voices on either side hawking for converts (whether for a separate Christian sub-culture or Christian nationalism). A third way lives in the culture in which we find ourselves and affect change, like yeast in dough, doing good and speaking often and openly of Jesus.
Back to Christmas, don’t misunderstand, I love this season with all of its prompts to remember the night when God moved into the neighborhood. The traditions that retell the difficult story of a birth to a girl and her soon-to-be husband serve to remind and encourage and to put us in concert with centuries of Jesus-followers. Even if some of the trappings of the season are sentimental imaginings, they loop us back to the truth of Emmanuel, God with us.
It’s good to love the baby, we just can’t leave him there.
The Book of Common Prayer conveys a worthy reminder for any who come to the manger to worship that much more is to come.
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light . . . let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
Rejoice in the birth. Learn from the teachings. Apprentice to the Master. Do what he did.
That’s a fine gift to yourself this Christmas.
Music for the week:
Funnies not tied to the holiday…
A travel agent said to his customer, "I can get you three days and two nights in Rome for a hundred bucks."
"How come so cheap?" replied the customer.
The travel agent told her, "The days are July 11, 12 and 13. The nights are July 21 and 22."
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WORDS YOU WON'T FIND IN THE DICTIONARY
1) Arachnoleptic fit (n.) The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
2) Beelzebug (n.) Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at 3 am in the morning and cannot be cast out.
3) Bozone (n.) The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
4) Caterpallor (n.) The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.
5) Decaflon (n.) The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
6) Dopelar effect (n.) The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when you come at them rapidly.
…and a bit from Nate, straight from Bethlehem