Christmas Peace and New Creation Year

I have been listening to some Christmas music and thinking about what meaning they have for us. One song in particular has caught my attention. Before I tell you the song I find it interesting that we can sing about peace one time a year and then pursue violence as a means to an end the rest of the year. Perhaps we should be praying for a less hypocritical spirit instead of us winning a unjust war, just saying. This going to be a bit of a soapbox, but please stay with me. The song in question is "O Holy Night" in particular the last stanza which says:

Truly He taught us to love one another,
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.
And in his name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
With all our hearts we praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we,
His power and glory ever more proclaim!
His power and glory ever more proclaim!

We often celebrate, at least in the Christian realm, that the reason Jesus was born was so the he could die [for our sins]. What a terrible thing to be born for, he was born to die! Unfortunately we focus so much on Jesus death that we forget that he lived, in fact it appears that his life was more important than his death to the Jewish authors because it encompasses much more of what we call the gospels than his death does. When we put the emphasis on his death instead of his life we miss his true purpose and we miss what these songs are saying too. The portion that I quoted above says, what I think is one of the most important messages of Christianity, one that I believe has be lost. Mainly that bot Jesus and God's message is about love and peace instead of death and destruction as many have supposed. The key of the gospel is that Jesus is Lord and he showed what it means to follow him through his life and proved that he is lord not by his death but by his resurrection in the Creator's power.

As this year comes to an end and the new year is about to begin, may we learn to live with the Prince of Peace as our Lord and bring new creation in the New Year!

Heaven, the Coward's Way Out

Heaven has widely been thought of as the place where good people go when they die. I say good people because many religions talk about heaven as the place where good people go, although it has been associated the most with Christianity. I have many thoughts about heaven, but for the sake of time (and people's sanity) I shall discuss my thoughts based off of a recent status update that I had. The status update was: "If we go to heaven when we die, evil wins because we have not delt [sp; dealt] with it, but have run from it. If we stand against it, evil will loose!"

In this regard, heaven has been greatly understood. We have this idea that if we are good and escape this life, that evil will be dealt with because "there is no evil in heaven" but this view is more pagan than Christian. If a person holds this view, it allows that person to not care about what is happening in the here and now, not only to the Earth, the plants and animals, but also to the people that fill the planet.

Does this view actually deal with the problem of evil? To save time the answer is "no". Let us look at it in this way, if you are in a war (I have in mind the movie "Braveheart" and I do not intend this example to be construed as my views on war, because I assure you, I am against war, but that is a topic for another blog), so if you are in a war, you do not "win" that war by hiding and being passive, but rather by standing up and fighting. If you are following my metaphor going to heaven is the hiding, but living in the now, bringing justice to the world, we are defeating evil.

A person once said to me, "Only God can bring justice to the world" and I say that that is not wrong, but is an incomplete idea. Our role from the beginning is to be stewards over creation, working along side the Creator to restore creation, but it is only through the Creators power that we can do that in the first place. If we run from that role, evil wins, however if we fulfill that role, evil is defeated and creation is brought back around to its intended purpose.

"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." -Edmund Burke May you help bring heaven to Earth in the purest form.