chappelltemple

It’s said to be the third most performed Christmas song each year, and if you listen to one of those Christmas music stations on the radio, you’ll believe it.  Because everybody and their dog has sung the song, from Frank Sinatra to Doris Day to Ella Fitzgerald, Connie Francis, Jackie Gleason, Luthor Vandros, even Sweet Baby James Taylor.  But, of course, it was Judy Garland who first made it famous, singing it long ago in a 1944 MGM musical called Meet Me in St. Louis.

Now just in case you’ve haven’t seen that movie lately on Netflex or Hulu, it’s a pretty simple plot, for it’s about a family from St. Louis which is about to move to New York City for the father’s job promotion.  But they’re leaving St. Louis just before the long-anticipated World’s Fair of 1904, and everybody is upset about it, especially the five-year old daughter of that family, Tootie.  (Not the same Tootie that was on The Facts of Life, by the way—that came about forty years later!)  And so to cheer her up, her big sister Esther played by Judy Garland sings her this song on Christmas Eve.

The original lyrics written by Hugh Martin were rejected as too depressing, however, for they went something like,  “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/it may be your last/next year we may all be living in the past/Have yourself a merry little Christmas/pop that champagne cork/Next year we may all be living in New York.”  And I suppose for a lot of folks that would be a kind of depressing notion.  So Martin changed the words about it being that’s family last Christmas before living in the past to “let your heart be light/next year all our troubles will be out of sight.”  Which was better, and certainly more realistic than the wildly optimistic modern assertion that the song now suggests–“from now on our troubles will be out of sight.”

But then there were other problems with the song, as well.  Because when Frank Sinatra sang it 13 years later, he complained to Hugh Martin that the name of his album was A Jolly Christmas, and so could Martin please jolly up the line that originally said “in a year we all will be together if the Fates allow, until then we’ll just have to muddle through somehow.”  Yeah, who wants to just muddle through Christmas– that doesn’t sound very merry at all!  So Martin changed it again so that Old Blue Eyes could sing instead “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.”

But, you see, sometimes the truth is that we do have to muddle through to the manger somehow, for the upcoming holidays can get pretty frenetic, can’t they?  So sometimes we simply need to put one foot in front of another one, do what needs to be done, deal with whatever comes up, and start over when we have to.  Someone has noted that this is part of the wisdom of twelve-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous– they don’t focus on lifetime solutions, they don’t promise that things will be great “from now on” forever and ever–no, they talk about daily victories–staying sober one day at a time.

Which is perhaps why when James Taylor–himself no stranger to difficult personal circumstances–put out his recording of the old holiday classic with the original “muddling” words that he wrote a note to the radio stations to accompany it which said, “It’s a sweet simple message–just get through the hard times and there will be better days ahead.”

And that’s the message of Christmas that the Advent season points us towards.  For the truth is, none of us have perfect lives or perfect circumstances in our lives.  Some of us  struggle with the same kind of demons that James Taylor has–with depression and substance abuse.  And some are fighting disease either in their own bodies, or in those of people whom they love.  Others are worried about their finances, and boy does Christmas put a strain in that area for a lot of people.  (After all, why do you think they call it Black Friday?) And still others are just plain burned out because life has come at them hard and they’ve been just a little–or a lot–beaten down by it.

What Advent reminds us of, however, is that there is indeed something–indeed Someone–coming into this world that can change everything.  We just have to wait until that Someone gets here.  That’s why St. Paul writing to the church in Galatia told them that as children of this earth, we’ve all been enslaved to the basic principles of the world.  But when the “fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship,” with all of the legal rights which that term implied in Roman culture.

Or to put it another way, until Christ, we were all just muddling through life, but now, there’s a new possibility for every one of us.  We just have to learn how to wait upon the Lord sometimes, for that is when we shall indeed renew our strength.

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison camp, that once observed that “A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes– and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside— is not a bad picture of Advent.” And then he went on to say that “Not everyone can wait: neither the sated nor the satisfied nor those without respect can wait. The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them.”

So until then when it comes to the tough parts of life we may indeed just have to muddle through somehow. But again, not as those who have no hope,  for you and I  know–just as Bonhoeffer likewise understood so long ago–that change is coming. And that’s what makes Advent so exciting, I think, for it is an annual reminder of the fact that when the world was at its very darkest, God sent His light into it.  Which means as well that we can trust God with whatever may come our way, even if it’s an unexpected change of our circumstances.

Indeed, that’s really what Hugh Martin wanted to say in his muddling little song about a merry little Christmas. For the original words which Martin penned never said anything about the Fates controlling the events of our lives, as though what happens to us depends upon some impersonal force that does not know us.  Rather, in the original version that was changed for the movie, Martin said, “Through the years we all will be together if the Lord allows.” And in 2001, at the age of 86, Hugh Martin finally got the chance to change those lyrics back, writing an entirely new version of his classic entitled, “Have Yourself a Blessed Little Christmas.”

In short, the door of freedom really is about to swing open from the outside. Blessed indeed are all those who are ready to be free.

(Devotional shared at the evening Advent Celebration at Christ Church, 30 November.)

Dressed in an outfit overflowing with pink and white roses, she’s definitely the picture of a perfectly English baby. But despite her fair skin and blue–or at least we think they will be–twinkling eyes, our newest grandchild, Talitha, is unmistakably a half-Texan as well. For all throughout her home in Oxford, there are bits and pieces of Texana, reflecting her mother’s national heritage and heart.

There’s a map in the shape of the state made out of old Texas license plates, for instances, that dominates the “Texas Toilet” room, along with the iconic iron image of a cowboy kneeling at the cross. And on the refrigerator, there is not only another Texas flag proclaiming that “life is too short not to live it as a Texan,” but there’s also a magnet warning that “you can take me out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of me.”

Tali’s father, of course, simply smiles at the numerous Texotica (numbering more than twenty pieces by the count of one visitor) that make their home plainly different from the others all around it in their quaint collegiate setting. For Steve is the quintessential Englishman who seldom if ever gets riled or ruffled by such things.

At the risk of cowboy chauvinism, however, I think there’s something good about the fact that Tali and her older brother Jed will grow up with quite literally signs all around them of their dual nationality and backgrounds. For sometimes it’s only by remembering from where we have come that we can ever get to where we are meant to go.

It was that way with the Hebrews, for instance, which is why when the Exodus experience was coming to an end that the Lord spoke one more word through Moses which was simply to zakar or remember…remember who delivered you from bondage and brought you through the wilderness…remember who fed you manna each day when there was nothing else to eat… and remember whose people you are meant to be.

That’s my prayer for Talitha as she grows up, as well. For even as I know that she is going to be surrounded by the love of all of her family, my hope is that she knows that love comes from beyond just our hearts– that it comes from the very heart of God who gave her life and then loaned her to her parents for such a very short while indeed.

Long before any of us were born, in fact, centuries before the Christ, it was the prophet Isaiah who saw “a rose e’er blooming” in the wilderness, testimony to all that God can do even when we see no possibilities at all. So I pray too that as Talitha comes to know God that she will know His faithfulness in her own life.

In short, she’s going to grow up as both a fair English rose and as a Yellow Rose from Texas. And if you think that’s an odd combination, just remember the nursery rhyme version of the old song that likewise combines both traditions:

“The Yellow Rose of Texas, and the man of Laramie,
Invited Davy Crockett to have a cup of tea,
O the tea was so delicious, they had another cup.
And left to Davy Crockett to do the washing up!”

I doubt, of course, that the tea was pre-sweetened or iced down, such as you find everywhere in Texas. But then again, I have a feeling that our “Yellow Rose of Oxford” is going to grow up liking it both ways. And even better that having two nationalities, how great it is that she’s going to be a citizen of Heaven as well.

After all, the Rose E’er Blooming is already in her life.

It was definitely not what she expected to discover that night. For when Angie finally managed to get her 21-month old down for the night—a clear victory in their house—she finished tidying up the kitchen and was thinking she might even go to bed early herself.  Until, that is, she heard the knock at the door.

With her husband out for the evening, and having just moved to the community a few weeks earlier—to say nothing of expecting their second child in just a matter of weeks–Angie was understandably hesitant to open the door.  But the knocking kept on, persistently so for over half an hour, in fact.  Until suddenly there was another sound and looking down the stairway from where she sat upstairs—cell phone in hand to call for help if needed—she saw a note pushed under the door.

And when she got up the courage to creep down the stairs to retrieve it, here is what it said:

“Hi you made a cake for my son Marcus once and it was very nice. Where we live we had a flood and everybodys belonging got ruined.  A 6 yr old boys birthday is on Saturday and all of his presents was ruined to.  We would be very grateful if you could bake him a cake.  Please contact me Beverly. Thank  you.”

Angie had no idea who Beverly was, but quickly figured out that she must have been a neighbor who had mistaken her family for the one who lived in the university-provided house before them. So she rang Beverly up on the phone number she had listed to let her know what had happened.  Only whether it was her Texas accent falling on decidedly English ears or not, Beverly didn’t seem to understand at all that Angie wasn’t the same person who had baked the cake for her son.

Instead, Beverly launched into telling her about the flood and how the little neighbor boy, Alfie, needed a cake for his party on Saturday and that he loves Transformers. So Angie agreed to make the cake and drop it off, only to discover that Beverly wasn’t a neighbor at all, but lived on the other side of town from where they had driven over just to track down the “cake maker.”

Now having been fortunate to sample her wares numerous times, I can testify that Angie is quite a good cook and baker indeed, but our daughter will be the first to tell you that her baking is very homey and she is not at all a cake-decorator. In her own words, in fact, she’s tried it a few times and she always has “way more ambition than skill,” with the efforts usually ending up with her “in a panic over a piping bag.”

Still, Angie and her husband Steve, along with their 21-month old, Jed, spent most of one day that week shopping for a Transformers action figure and cake decorating supplies and ingredients, and then baking a four-layer cake, making the icing and decorating it—a project that turned into a 15-hour operation, in fact, stretching late into the night.

And when they took the cake to Beverly on the following day, she then found out that the woman who had lived in their home before them had actually been a part of a network called “Free Cakes for Kids” in which amateur bakers make cakes for kids in need.  What’s more, Beverly and her husband could not have been nicer, and even invited Angie and Steve to the birthday party on Saturday if they could come.

Angie’s “take on the cake” is worth repeating, however, for she summed up well what it means to follow the Spirit’s promptings when they may come in our lives.

“As I was making this cake, I felt like God was in the midst of it, trying to teach me to live more in him. One thing I kept feeling was surrender— I hadn’t planned or volunteered to make this cake and I had little skill to do it, but it somehow just fell into my lap, and it seemed that God had put it before me. Jesus says that he stands at the door and knocks! And in my experience he keeps on knocking!

And it reminded me that our lives are meant to be about opening up to God and surrendering to his purposes for us, purposes that we don’t always see coming, things he wants to do in and through us. I get so obsessed with trying to plan out my life and organize and schedule everything, but in this cake the Lord reminded me that my life is really to be about getting caught up in the life that he would rather have me live.   

 Something else God showed me was his heart for us, a heart of immense and reckless love. One of Jed’s favorite stories is the parable of the lost sheep, where the shepherd is relentless in his search to find the one missing sheep out of a hundred. It’s a foolish thing the shepherd does, to spend all that time and effort on one little sheep.  Jesus asks, “Which one of you wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine sheep out on the field and go after the one missing sheep?” I think it’s a rhetorical question— that’s crazy, none of us would do that. Which of us busy moms wouldn’t drop everything and spend 15 hours baking a Transformers birthday cake for a kid you’ve never met? Were it not for the grace of God, I wouldn’t.

 But this is the kind of God we have, one who loves us recklessly and personally, and goes to great effort to seek us. This is what God does. He reminded me of that in the hours I spent making a cake for a little kid on a rough council estate across town, a kid I’ll probably never meet. The life and kind of love God calls us towards is one a reckless love, one of abandon, of giving up ourselves and our plans for others.

 I think that, God, in his mercy, is using this Transformers cake to do more of the work of transforming me.”

It all reminds me of what St. Paul said long ago, namely, that we are God’s handiwork, “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which He prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2.10).  I can’t help but wonder, in fact, just how great it might be if we were all transformed into folks with hearts ready to serve others, even when it takes us out of comfort zones.

Maybe then, like they used to say of the original Transformers, we too would be “more than meets the eye.”

I think of it every year about this time, especially when October comes around and we’re still looking at warm temperatures here in Texas.  For spending three years in New England during seminary, I was always struck by the beauty of  fall in that very different part of the world.

Perched upon the highest hill in Essex County some thirty miles from Boston, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary has a commanding view indeed, with the Atlantic Ocean just ten miles away on one side, and the nascent beginnings of the Berkshires and White Mountains on the other.  And created out of a former Catholic monastery and great house on the North Shore, the buildings and grounds are simply spectacular, no matter what the season.

It is in the fall, however, that the surroundings put on their best show, as a cacophony of colors compete to assault the eyes with red, orange, yellow and purple hues of every shade. How odd it is, though, that the enormous beauty that comes each year in autumn is actually produced by the death of the leaves, as the shortening days reduce the light and water that is needed for their photosynthesis.  For it is only the dearth of chlorophyll, the chemical that gives plants their green color, that enables us to see the yellow and orange colors that have actually been there all along.

Likewise, in trees such as maples, when photosynthesis stops, the glucose which the trees have produced is then trapped in the leaves, turning into the bright reds and purples that are so striking to the eye. It is thus the combination of all of these things that produces the beautiful foliage that tourists from around the world will fly to Boston, and then actually sit in traffic jams on two-lane country roads for hours, just to see each year.

All of which is a reminder that sometimes even out of difficult and death-like experiences, beautiful things can come–unexpected possibilities, in fact, that can both delight and enrich those who are ready to see them.  When we face such times in our lives, thus, perhaps that’s the time to ask God to open our eyes to see the fuller picture that He sees.

After all, the whole Christian enterprise began in a cemetery when everyone assumed that death had managed to have the last word after all.

Everyone was wrong. And thanks be to God for that!

It’s said that the idea goes all the way back to the twelfth century, and later on, it even shows up in the classic tale of Don Quixote, though Cervantes substituted “goat” for “sheep” in his account. Likewise, thanks to countless cartoons and comics, the notion of “counting sheep” in order to induce sleep is now thoroughly engrained in the common culture as well.

Having just led a study group hiking through Israel for two weeks, however, I’m fairly convinced that it works the other way. For after numerous times of tallying up the pilgrims in our little group each day, I found myself counting to forty even after I had fallen asleep each night.

But then, maybe that’s what shepherds are supposed to do.   For clearly if there is one task that a shepherd has in life, it is to keep track of those assigned to him or her, even when they may wander off or put themselves in perilous positions.

That’s why a shepherd would usually carry a rod with them, or as my friends in Kenya call it, a “rungu.” Carved and whittled down with great care and patience, such rods were shaped to exactly fit the hand of the shepherd who selected it. For after spending hours practicing with it, a good shepherd could learn how to throw it with amazing speed and accuracy, driving away predators such as coyotes, wolves, and cougars, as well as beating down the brush to discourage snakes from disturbing the flock.

Likewise, the rod could be used to discipline and correct any wayward sheep. For if a shepherd saw one of his flock wandering away, or headed towards poisonous weeds, or indeed getting too close to danger of any sort, that club could go whistling through the air to send them scurrying back to join the bunch.

Perhaps even more significantly, however, the rod was used to examine and count the sheep. Ezekiel 20.37 tells us, in fact, that God even used this imagery when He told the Israelites that He would cause them to “pass under the rod” as He brought them each into the bond of the covenant.

What’s more, when it came time for judgment, the rod was used to part the sheep’s long wool in order to check for any disease or wounds or defects that a particular animal might have. For to put it more plainly, a good shepherd never let any of his charges “pull the wool” over his eyes.

It’s no wonder then that the shepherd king David so famously observed that the rod and staff of God were a comfort to him. For truly, it was the rod–ever ready in the shepherd’s hand– that provided not only for the safety of each of the sheep but for their inclusion within the community as well.

Tomorrow morning all across the Methodist connection, numerous pastors will begin new appointments in congregations that may for all the world look a bit like nervous sheep as they await a word from their new shepherds. Here’s praying therefore that the promise of Jeremiah 3.15 will be an encouragement to them all: “And I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding.”

Even if they have to throw that rungu every once in a while as well.

It happened almost forty years ago, somewhere between Massachusetts and Texas. For when we left Boston, headed back home to take our first pastoral appointment, I had been told that we were being posted to the town of Waller, a small burg just to the northwest of Houston.

By the time my aging Dodge Dart could make it back to the Lone Star State, however, the bishop had changed the appointment. And so we spent the next three years happily settled into the coastal community of Brazoria, aptly named for the adjacent Brazos River–or as the early Spanish settlers called it, the Rio de los Brazos de Dios, or “The River of the Arms of God.”

And now apparently, it’s happened once again. For before I ever even officially got to my new job downtown as the Director of the Center for Congregational Excellence of the Texas Annual Conference–a title I worried would never fit on a regular sized business card, by the way— my appointment has shifted. Instead, I am now being sent to serve as the pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Sugar Land, a congregation nestled right up against that same Brazos River, only some forty miles or so further upstream than our first assignment.

Such sudden changes, of course, come with the job of being an itinerant Methodist pastor. Admittedly, we’re not quite the “prophets of the long road” that our circuit-riding predecessors were. But in the end, those of us who are the spiritual heirs of John Wesley and Francis Asbury still go where we are sent, and we gladly serve those to whom we have been appointed.

To be clear, let me own the fact that as odd as it all unfolded–quite literally coming together just this week, in the days after our annual conference ended and I preached my final sermon at Lakewood– I felt God’s gentle nudge to offer myself up for this assignment and I believe that the revised appointment is the right one for us. Likewise, I hope in turn that I can be the right pastor for Christ UMC at this time in their church’s life as well.

I will miss being on the bishop’s cabinet, however, an opportunity I have greatly enjoyed since January when I unofficially joined that group. I’ve been impressed, in fact, by the careful and prayerful work that the cabinet has done in making over a hundred appointments this spring, but never really rushing any of them. They work hard at trying to get it right for everyone involved, a task not at all as easy as it might seem from the outside.

And I have similarly observed a genuine concern on the part of all of my colleagues, particularly our bishop, to try to discern what is needed the most not just for the congregation or pastors involved, but for the mission field around each appointment too. In the words of Mr. Wesley, we ought always to be concerned for those persons who are not yet in “the household of faith” but are “groaning” so to be.

Technically, I will continue to be appointed to the Center for the next two months, teaching Methodist History for Perkins in July before beginning the pastorate at Christ UMC on September 1. And this will enable me to set the record for the shortest tenure ever recorded on the Texas Annual Conference Cabinet.

Years from now, in fact, I suspect I might actually be a trivia question within the conference lore–perhaps even the “Kevin Costner of the Cabinet” whom some might recall was actually cast in the 1983 classic film The Big Chill, but whose scenes were entirely edited out before the movie’s actual release. I’ll be curious to see, thus, whether I am photo-shopped out of the official cabinet picture that was taken just a week or so ago while at conference!

As much as we never saw it coming, thus, I am curiously hopeful that this sudden change of plans will put us smack dab in the middle of God’s Will for our lives, something that often we have only discovered after we arrived there.

But then, after all, how wrong can you really go when you end up back where you began, resting in the Arms of God?

It’s been thirty-seven years since it first came out but I remember it as though it were yesterday.  For the moment the movie began, like a tractor beam pulling in the Millenium Falcon, I was drawn into the imagery, the ideas, the heroes and villains, the soaring music, even the cheesy title slides of George Lucas’ space-opera trilogy, Star Wars.  What’s more, so was almost everybody else I knew.  Because something within that story hit a nerve for a lot of people and it still does.  Indeed, not only was the film franchise able to span decades, but there’s a new set of Star Wars movies being produced right now for release next year, and I have no doubt but that they will set box office records as well, adding to the haul of some 4.3 billion dollars made so far and counting.

Now I mention all of this because today, just in case you don’t know it, is Star Wars Day within the popular culture.  Why?  Because it’s the fourth of May, of course.  And as Star Wars fans are quick to say, “May the Fourth Be With You.”  (You can tell a Methodist, by the way, because whenever we hear that recurring refrain from the movie, “May the Force be with you,” we intrinsically want to respond, “And also with you.”)

The reason why there is an appeal to this film series for me, at least, however, is that it speaks to the great battle that goes on inside of each of us between good and evil.  St. Paul spoke to that long before George Lucas, of course, when he admitted to the Romans,

“I do not know what I am doing.  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do… I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.  So I find this law at work:  when I want to do good, evil is right there with me.”  (Romans 7.15-21)

And it’s true, isn’t it?  But before we draw too close of a parallel between the struggle of St. Paul and the epic conflict of the cosmos in Star Wars, we ought to recognize that there is not just an impersonal force which is in charge of the universe, but there is an intensely personal Father.

Indeed, that’s one of the absolutely mind-boggling truth-claims of the Christian faith—that the God who made all things, the stars and all the planets in all the constellations in all of the galaxies, even those long ago and far far away, that same expressive power is not just a functional deity, or even a mystical life-force or energy field, but He is a Creator who is not only able to relate to every single one of His creatures, but who desires to do so.  It’s not the Force whom we need with us in life, thus—it’s the Father.  For even ultimate energy has no real appeal to us unless there is both an intelligence and the possibility of a meaningful interaction with it somehow.

Likewise, there IS a battle between good and evil going on in this world, maybe even going on inside of each of us, but it is not a struggle between the dark side and light side of a single eternal force, for the truth is, God HAS no dark side.  1 John 1.5 tells us that “God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all.”  And plainly put, what that means is that God has no divided personality; there is no bifurcation in the divine will, no divided loyalties, no struggle between good and evil there, for God is the very definition of perfect goodness itself.

Other traditions have seen it differently, to be sure.  What George Lucas rechanneled in his films was actually just an old philosophy known as dualism, somewhat akin to the Oriental expression of ying and yang.  But the biblical truth tells us that evil is not a co-equal force with good.  It exists everywhere, yes, and it is powerful and it can win out in a particular struggle we may be having, but in the end it does not have any real power over us, for if we belong to God, if we’ve given Him our heart, if we’ve asked for the Holy Spirit, then no one, not even the devil himself (and certainly not Darth Vader) will be able to snatch us from God’s palm.

Which brings us to say one last word, namely, that our task in life therefore is simply to choose God.  It’s like what Joshua said to the Israelites long ago and far away.  He reminded them of all that God had done in bringing them out of Egypt and then he said this:

“Now fear the Lord and serve Him with all faithfulness.  Throw away the gods your fathers worshipped beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.  But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24.14-15)

It’s a pretty good word, even on Star Wars Day.  God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.  So choose for yourself life—and the real FORCE will indeed be with you.

(And also with me.)

They haunt me and they hurt me each time that I read them. For even while I know all about their setting and their original application–as a plaintive lament over the ruined conditions of Jerusalem following its destruction in 586 B.C.–I can’t help but wonder if the writer of those ancient words spoke of things He did not know.

Oh, I understand that this is a complex literary work indeed, with intricately constructed acroustic poems following the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which may or may not have been written by Jeremiah. (The Septuagint version says that they were, but the Hebrew Masoretic text does not.) Likewise, I am painfully aware of the many dangers that come if we take a scripture out of its proper context.

Still, whenever I come across these few verses in the Old Testament my mind is drawn inexorably to the pivotal moment in the New. For could it be that the prophet, glancing about his collapsing society, was also speaking of the Messiah as well when he asked the question that has reverberated down through the centuries:

“Is it nothing to you, all who pass by? Look around and see: is any suffering like my suffering?”

For in truth, was any suffering like His suffering? Was there ever such a travesty of judgment in all of human history–such a colossal miscarriage of justice–such a stupendous and patently unwarranted waste of human life–as in what took place on the eve of Passover long ago?

And yet, so the record tells us, not only was there no mass protest over the verdict that day, no riots in the streets or town square, the vast majority of those who witnessed the immediate execution indeed simply passed right by, with some of them hurling their insults as they went.

“He saved others… let him save himself now.”

And what a curiously ironic thing that was for them to say. For Jesus indeed saved others…from the discomfort of disease…from the anguish of mental illness…from the tragedies of losing a loved one…and even from themselves and their own sin. So clearly, He could have saved Himself had He chosen to do such.

But Jesus understood that the seriousness of our situation called for the kind of ultimate solution that only His death would provide. And so, in the unaltered words of an old spiritual that others have tried to modify to mollify our theological sensitivities, “When I was sinking down beneath God’s righteous frown, Christ laid aside His crown for my soul.”

The tragedy, of course, is that the vast majority of those who passed by that day did not see it. But I have to wonder just how many who pass by our churches on this day won’t see it either.

A preacher of another era, G.A. Studdert-Kennedy, once put it this way:

When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree.                                                   They drove great nails through hands and feet and made a Calvary.                                   They crowned Him with a crown of thorns; red were His wounds and deep,                         For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.

When Jesus came to our town, they simply passed Him by.                                                      They never hurt a hair of Him; they only let Him die.                                                                   For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain.                                  They only just passed down the street and left Him in the rain.

So is it really nothing to all you who pass by?

You never know how those preacher’s kids will turn out, especially when their father is not only a deacon in the church, but a respected judge in the community.  So when at the age of just barely sixteen, a boy named Maewyn was grabbed off of his father’s farm by kidnappers… well, some folks today would probably have said that he must have been into something that he shouldn’t have been doing anyway.

Only in this case, the boy genuinely was innocent of any wrongdoing.  What’s more, something which his folks had taught him over the years had apparently sunk in. For when he ended up sold into slavery in another country, the subsequent years of servitude that he spent as a shepherd there somehow didn’t leave him bitter but better, producing maturity and not meanness.

Indeed, his Christian faith was not only not derailed by the disaster that happened to him—“six years a slave,” as Hollywood might call it– but it actually deepened.  For during the long lonely hours spent tending to his master’s herds on the slopes of Slemish Mountain, Maewyn discovered the inexplicable comfort that can come in prayer.  In his own words, “the love of God and His fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened.”

When he finally managed to escape, thus, sloshing through the bogs and scaling the mountains which separated him from the sea, Maewyn returned home until something inside him convinced him that he should do the unthinkable.  For they say that he had a dream in which he heard the voice of his former captors calling, “We beg you, young boy, to come and walk among us once more.”

And so after preparing himself as thoroughly as he could, that preacher’s kid left his family in England and returned back into the wilds of a country not yet civilized or strongly touched by the positive influences of Christianity.  Only this time, Maewyn, who had taken the name of Patrick after becoming a priest, went to Ireland not as a slave, but as a missionary.

He returned first to the very pagan chieftain who had bought him as a boy, but rather than be embarrassed by a former slave, that man set fire to his house and threw himself into the flames.  And so Patrick then went to Tara, the seat of the high king of Hibernia, arriving at the castle there just in time for a pagan celebration which happened to coincide with Easter that year.  In full view of all, Patrick chose to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ instead, kindling an Easter fire on a nearby hill called Slane, a name now used for the hymn tune associated with “Be Thou My Vision.”

A confrontation ensued, but Patrick stood and called out simply, “May God arise and His enemies be scattered.”  And so God did, marking the beginning of a remarkable thirty-year mission to the Emerald Isle in which Patrick baptized tens of thousands and established hundreds of churches across the land.  Twice imprisoned, he continued despite all manner of opposition and obstacles, fearing neither because of “the promises of heaven.”  In his words, “I have cast myself into the hands of God Almighty who rules everywhere.”

And indeed, by the time of his death in 460 A.D., Ireland, a once pagan island, became a Christian stronghold sending missionaries back to Scotland and England and even beyond to the continent of Europe.  For Patrick plainly put into practice the words that he once inscribed upon his breastplate:  “Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.”

Of course, we call him a saint now and have reduced the remembrance of him each March 17 to a vague and often corny celebration of all things Irish.  But maybe what’s really worth remembering on that day is the example of an individual who not only understood the strength of forgiveness, but the transforming power of the gospel to turn those who don’t know God into His very sons and daughters.

Some might say that it took a slave thus to set a nation free.  But then,maybe we should similarly never underestimate what a preacher’s kid can actually do with a faith of their own worth sharing.