Epiphany Meditation about Establishing and Crossing Boundaries
On several occasions during my childhood, I woke to the sound of Elvis Presley’s voice booming through the house: “It’s Christmas time pretty baby…” Only this would happen in February and March, and it meant that snow had fallen during the night and there was some more or less impressive accumulation blanketing the ground. Snow means Christmas. It doesn’t matter if it’s December or a freak flurry in April—it’s Christmas. Playing Christmas music when it snowed was my dad’s way of squeezing a little joy out of those dreary late winter months.
As I write, it is January 6, Epiphany. Our decorations are in totes in the barn and our Christmas tree is in the yard. But snow is falling and Kenny G is playing “Winter Wonderland” through my computer speakers. It’s Christmas!
In the traditional church calendar, Advent ends on Christmas Day and the 12 days of Christmastide begin. Christmastide ends on Epiphany, when the church remembers that the birth of Jesus is good news for all the nations. I’m not sure what was wrong with that way of doing it. People want to start watching Christmas movies in November, I guess.
In the spirit of the old ways, of Epiphany, and of celebrating Christmas whenever it snows, I have a final meditation. Throughout Advent, I’ve been thinking about the existential crisis theme in Christmas movies and how it presents characters with a choice between embracing the spirit of Christmas or remaining devoted to selfish ambitions and trivial pursuits. Thomas Merton’s idea of the true self helped us frame this Christmas movie trope as a matter of sin and repentance—the way of life and the way of death—or as James might say, the way that is from above and the way that is from below (Js 3:15-17).
The danger of this way of thinking is that it is focused on the self and could lead to an inwardness where we don’t turn and reach out to others. It is a danger within ourselves and it is an acute danger in our hyper-individualistic culture. This is not a criticism of Merton, who understood union with God to be a necessary condition for love: “To say that I am made in the image of God,” he writes, “is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love (New Seeds of Contemplation, 60).
If our Advent reflections turn us inward for a time, Epiphany calls us out again, to remind us that the good news of Jesus’s birth is to be shared with others. I hear a lot of talk about boundaries these days. Boundaries are healthy, I am told. I believe there is some truth in that statement. But if we look to Jesus and not to the TED talks or podcast gurus for our understanding of health, we will be more interested in breaking down boundaries than establishing them. Love crosses boundaries. In taking on flesh, Jesus crossed the boundary between the eternal and the temporal. Creator became creation and the canyon of that boundary line is greater than we can understand. And the story of his birth proves that Jesus came to break down boundaries. The magi who came from the east to worship Jesus and bring him gifts show us that though Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, his kingdom is for people from all nations.
In God’s providence, I read Psalm 67 this morning. Verse 1 says “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us.” There is nothing unusual about people calling on their God to bless them. But the next verse continues, “so that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.” This is an Epiphany psalm. It’s about the blessing of Israel spreading to the nations. It doesn’t envision a zero sum game in which either Israel or the nations would be blessed. Israel was meant to live according to God’s law, to carry his covenant, to worship God and dwell with Him so that they might show the world what human flourishing looks like under God’s rule. Good news for the nations was not God’s plan B; blessing Israel was always about blessing the world.
Today, we may feel a tension between finding our true selves hidden in Christ and going to all nations and making disciples. But this dichotomy is false. Good boundaries tell us where we end and someone else begins. They allow us to find our true sense of self in Christ and not in achievement or the approval of others or possessions or anything else. Boundaries, in this sense, do not keep people away; they allow us to bring others close in healthy relationships. Good boundaries ensure that we have something good to offer those to whom we relate. I’ve heard it said that what we have to offer others is our transformed and transforming presence. The evangelical in me wants to object that we have to offer the gospel. But I wonder if that is necessarily different.
As we think about the new year and our mission as a church, Epiphany can push us to be ambitious to reach those who are far away from God with the good news. I hope and desire to see our church grow with people from across the spectrum from skeptics and doubters to mature believers. But as we pray and invite people and reach out to our community, we must do so as transformed people who know that who we are is hidden in Christ, what we need we receive from Him, and that if He isn’t with us on our mission, we don’t want to go (Ex. 33:15).
As it was for Israel, so it is for the church today. We aren’t called to eschew the blessings of being in Christ. We must and should strive to enter God’s rest (Hb 4:11). But we should not use this blessing to turn inward and build up barriers that keep others at bay. That misunderstands the purpose of the blessing. Finding our true selves hidden in Christ is the condition for reaching out to others in love. Our holiness—our wholeness—shows the lost and hurting the good that the good news invites them to. And in our age of identity confusion and relational breakdown, a community of people securely grounded, rooted, in Jesus and His gospel will be a shining light to those in darkness.
May this be true of you and of Redeemer Church. God has planted us with deep roots and I am grateful for each of you. My prayer is that He will send us the lost from every tribe, tongue, and nation and that we will be ready to welcome and invite them into a new life in Christ, a life that we experience by His grace.
Once again, I invite your thoughts. I would love to hear how you experience these ideas, where you struggle and where you are seeing growth and blessing. I would love to share my experience with you. And ultimately I pray that we would always spur one another on to good works so that some may be compelled to glorify God.