Waxing Theological

12-24-16 (Christmas Eve Year A) Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20 Real Savior - It’s a Boy ! When you think of the events that happened at Christmas Eve… what do you picture?  How do the events play out in the theatre of your mind’s eye?  Does it look like the picture on the front of a Christmas card?  Is it staged like a Cecil B. DeMille movie with incredible grandeur and production values?  Does it look more like the nativity set you have sitting on the mantlepiece?  For me, it’s definitely the nativity figures.  When I was growing up, it was that nativity that captured my imagination and shapes a lot of my early Christmas memories.  My father has a beautiful hand-carved antique nativity that he bought while he was stationed overseas in the Air Force.  The figures are exquisitely detailed and sit in a stable that is equally intricate.  The scene has real moss and hay in it, the figures are dressed in real fabrics… my father even kept a ...

12-11-16 (Advent 3A) Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 1:18-25 Joy in the Unexpected When we were in seminary, we spent a lot of time in classes, a lot of time reading for classes, and a lot of time writing papers and doing projects for classes - but believe it or not, we actually did have some free time in the midst of having to parse Greek or Hebrew sentences and write papers exploring the hows and whys of the laws about mildew in Deuteronomy.  In that free time, we each found different ways to relax, to unwind, and to manage the stresses of our classes and classwork.  As we got to know one another, we learned about what helped each of us stay sane, and we sometimes talked about our “guilty pleasures” with one another.  You know what I mean - the things that we really enjoy that maybe not everybody else would understand, and so maybe we don’t lead off in a conversation by talking about those things?  For my friends and I, it was comic books - we’d pile into one ...

12-4-16 (Advent 2C) Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12 Strange Images of Hope There’s a state park near my hometown in western Pennsylvania called Cook Forest.  It’s the largest virgin white pine and hemlock forest east of the Rocky Mountains and was even the site for a Cecil B. DeMille film called “Unconquered.”  Our family visited the park frequently to float down the river, to buy products from different local artists, and to enjoy the beauties of the forest together. One of the stranger things that we saw in Cook Forest was a large rock left behind millennia ago by the glaciers of the Ice Age as they shifted and melted.  Now, there are a lot of these boulders and huge rocks scattered all over this area, but this one stands out in particular because it has a tree growing on top of it.  We talked to a park ranger about it once and he explained that trees will occasionally grow on top of the boulders like that almost by happenstance - a bunch of leaves ...