I'll have a blue Christmas

For such a festive holiday, Christmas has no shortage of wistful, melancholic songs associated with it: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, I'll Be Home for Christmas (If Only in My Dreams), Blue Christmas, and virtually all of the songs on my favorite Christmas album--Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas--are arranged in such a way as to bring out the melancholy. Even the Christmas hymns express this. One of my favorites is What Child Is This, an old English folk melody, which has lyrics like these:

Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.

Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

In a religious sense, that melancholia exists because implicit in the incarnation is the crucifixion, as the lyrics quoted above make brutally clear. Furthermore, reading the account of the annunciation in Luke 2 you see that Mary's initial response to the angel's announcement is not joy but fear, which Yeats' poem The Mother of God, which I posted on earlier, captures so well.

I think emphasizing the melancholic aspects of the holiday may be one way of combating the relentless commercialization of Christmas.

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SERMON: The Great Omission (Mt. 28:16-20)

This sermon was delivered at Yale Divinity School in 2020 for the class Sacred Moments in African-American Preaching. I begin with a simple observation. Of the four canonical gospels, Matthew is the only one that ends with the words of Jesus. Mark, Luke, and John all end in the narrator’s voice, but Matthew closes with the words of Jesus. Mark ends at the tomb, with the women fleeing in terror and amazement. Luke ends with the disciples in Jerusalem, praising at the temple. John ends on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, with a dialogue between Jesus and Peter. And here Matthew ends with the disciples in Galilee, meeting Jesus at the mountain where he had directed them. Matthew gives Jesus the last word. But before we get to those last words, there are three other words in this passage that I call to our attention because I find them astonishing. Let me read verse 17 once more. “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some do...

Where have I been?

What a presumptuous question! But this is a blog, after all, and presumably someone is reading it--that's what the blog's statistics indicate, anyway. I haven't posted at all since Christmas because during my two weeks "off" for Christmas break I: prepared the children's Christmas sermon with my pastoral partner, Dan Yang; wrote the senior high curriculum for the winter youth group retreat; and prepared a seminar for the retreat on the Old Testament. All that took place the first week. The second week was spent at the retreat, from which I got back just in time for the New Year's service. So going back to school on January 3 was actually a welcome break from my break. Since I've been back on campus I've been immersed in my readings for Christianity's Cultured Critics, my course for the fall short term. The readings are not light (Hume, Kant, Schleiermacher, etc.), and I have to keep a daily critical log and prepare a group project for the l...

Unappetizer

Every Tuesday the pastors here go out for lunch together. Yesterday we visited a restaurant owned by a church member. The restaurant's specialty is a dish known as boshintang (보신탕), which is...well...dog stew. I thought that eating dog "meat" was confined to the more rural areas of Korea, but this restaurant was in the middle of Gangnam, one of the busiest districts of Seoul. Bottom line--no, I did not partake--the restaurant offered other dishes. Only a particular type of dog is raised for its "meat," or so I've read. In Korean they are called nureongi (누렁이), which is slang for "yellow one." They are mid-sized spitz-type dogs that look a lot like the Jindo, a dog native to Korea that Koreans revere for its intelligence and loyalty. Dog ownership is becoming quite common in Seoul, especially among younger Koreans, so I hope that Koreans find it increasingly difficult to distinguish dogs that sit on a couch from those that sit on a plate. ...

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