Author: stonecampbellgirl

I'm a recovering fundamentalist Christian.

Election + 26 days / Christmas – 21 days

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Advent is hard this year, y’all.

I suppose what I really mean is that anticipation of the usual cheer seems hard, although that means, conversely, that some aspects of the season are actually far easier to embrace.

In Advent each year, we play out Christ’s coming. For a time, then, in the church calendar Christ is not actually here yet, at least not figuratively. We are supposed to be in preparation mode, sweeping ourselves clean so that there is room in our lives and hearts for him to come in. Cue half-naked desert nomad with slightly crazed eyes:

Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Matthew 3:2b (KJV)

Or if you’d prefer your Baptizer a bit less Ren-faire:

Change your life. God’s kingdom is here.

(New Living Translation)

There we go: repent is a mystical but powerful spiritual concept; change is much more like an actual thing one must do. But they are both the essence of Advent, which is always about the means — the preparing — rather than the end.

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Election + 14 days

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I intended this blog to be something polished, something focused, organized around a schematic examination of one book of the Bible at a time. Then came the elephant in the room.

Let’s call the creature what it is: the election. We’ve chosen as President a man who is, at best, a charlatan, and at worst, a demagogue. Even stranger still is how little those of us who identify with the left when moral questions are concerned can fathom the choice of those we see to be on the opposite side, the fears that make so much hatred attractive and the oh-so-tempting deafness that comes from being comfortable enough to ignore that our neighbor’s house is in flames.

So these are the footprints of our elephant: the problematic face that will lead our nation and the seemingly unbridgeable gulf opening up between us. Perhaps someday soon I’ll be in the frame of mind to address that. Perhaps I’ll even be positive. But I don’t reckon that day is today, because all I can think about is the persistent widow and the unjust judge.

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