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Prinsons Without Walls

by Dr. Thomas Lane Butts
 
Several years ago I accepted an invitation to be the co-leader of a Community Building Workshop in a minimum security prison. When I arrived at the address to which I had been directed, I was not at all sure I was at the right location. There were no walls, fences, bars on the windows, or guard towers. I commented to the chaplain who had planned the event that it seemed unusual to see a prison without any of the architecture of confinement. I will never forget his comment. He said, "The walls and fences and bars of this prison are in the minds of the inmates".
 
He gave that explanation in such a casual and matter-of-fact manner that he seemed to think I should have known without asking. Well, in some respects, I did know. I knew something of the psychological process by which ordinary people confine themselves. I am also aware of how people often do the kind of mental violence to themselves which, if done to them by someone else, would provoke quick and serious resistance. But it had never occurred to me that it was possible to take a large group of people who were already in trouble for not abiding by the established rules and somehow tap into that concept of mental confinement so effectively that the group would actually remain in an institution without walls, fences and bars. It put me to thinking about the people I know in the free world who are just as completely imprisoned as those inmates.
 
There are people who have never been convicted of a crime who are confined in prisons with no walls, or fences except for those in their own minds. Perhaps you know people like that. You may be one of them. It is likely that all of us suffer that kind of incarceration some of the time, and to some degree. There are also people who are doing a life sentence of hard time, mentally.
 
When we see people imprisoned by hatred, resentment, prejudice, jealousy, self-imposed ignorance, and/or any number of irrational fears (phobias), we cannot help but wonder, "Why?"  From our perspective it is clear  they hold the key to freedom in their own hands. When we see people locked in a room with obviously open doors, we wonder why they don''t walk out. The answer to that question is almost never as simple as it seems. A psychiatrist would say that their situation is "over determined", i.e. determined by multiple factors, many of which lie so far beneath the surface of consciousness and are so tangled that the mental prisoner may never untangle them without serious help.
 
Since we cannot see inside the minds of these people, we know very little about their prison, or how and why those invisible walls and fences were built. Even when we can look into their eyes and see the chains on their souls, or listen to their voices and hear the echoing sounds of a dungeon, we still do not know what happened or why. It is therefore prudent to be slow to judge, if we judge at all, because we do not know and cannot understand. Even professionals proceed with care.
 
There are many ways to deal with our negative feelings. Have you ever wished you were someone else? It happens to people who have never learned to live at peace with themselves. It happens to people whose mantra is, "I hate myself". Self-hatred is a self-inflicted wound by people who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what has happened and respond to relatives and friends who have abused and misused them, so they unload hatred on themselves.  We may be able to get away from other people, but we cannot escape from ourselves. Living with someone you hate when that someone is you can make you wish you were someone else. In his play, Orpheus Descending, Tennessee Williams has one of his characters say, "We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life".
 
There are walls and fences in the mind so common that we are all liable to become imprisoned by them unless we exercise intentional effort to stay free.  Behind these conventional walls we will find prisoners of the past, prisoners of old mistakes, prisoners of problems beyond our power to fix, and prisoners of racism and other forms of ignorance.  The list is endless.
 
Another form of personal imprisonment so subtle and common that almost anyone can be trapped by it is the daily danger of becoming prisoners of the unimportant. Henry Knox Sherrill once observed: "The real trouble with the church is that we have so many good people with great convictions about little things". It can also happen in families when an authority figure elevates one rule to the level of the Ten Commandments while ignoring other guiding principles of living together that are of equal or greater importance.
 
The great musician, Tchaikovsky, was neurotic. Most of us are to some degree about something. Sigmund once opined that "neurosis seems to be a human privilege".  Legend has it that Tchaikovsky's neurosis was expressed as an overpowering fear that some day, while conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, his head would fall off. The chance of his head falling off while conducting the orchestra would be infinitesimally small. But the fear of that happening was so overwhelming that for 30 years Tchaikovsky conducted the Leningrad Philharmonic with his left hand while he held his head in place with his right hand.
 
Most of us have neurotic fears and hang-ups, which while they are not so exotic as Tchaikovsky's are no less inhibiting to the achievement of our real potential. Have you ever wondered what you could do or be if you could be set free of the unreasonable fears, ideas, and anxieties which dominate your life and take up so much of your time and energy? Have you ever wondered what your life would be, lived with both hands?  When we look at other people we tend to think, from a superficial observation, that they have their lives in manageable units.  Little wonder that so many wish they were someone else!
 
Our limitations are usually lines we have drawn. Most of us have the key to our private jail house door. If you cannot find your key, there are people who can help you with a "get out of jail free" card. Some 2000 years ago an old friend of ours said that God had sent him into the world to "heal the broken-hearted, preach deliverance to the captive, and set at liberty those who are bruised..." (Luke 4:18). He has helped lots of people. Next time you find yourself languishing in one of those prisons without walls ask him to pardon you.

Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Thomas Lane Butts
 
When I remember the brief and intense life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I think of the haunting quatrain by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
 
    My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;;
    But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
    It gives lovely light!
 
He was just 39 years old, in the prime of life, when he was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee by a hired assassin. They intended to be rid of the trouble-maker and disturber of the peace. The racists reasoned that if they killed the leader, the "Movement" would die. So, they killed him, and he was not even 40 years old.
 
His enemies made a terrible miscalculation, they killed him, but he would not stay dead. He has become more powerful in death than in life. His dream has bloomed into a reality far beyond the most hopeful expectations anyone had while he was alive, or even had he lived a long life advocating his dream. Today, 44 years after his death, he continues to show up like "Banquo's Ghost". Hundreds of thousands of people across the nation will meet and march this week to celebrate his life and commit themselves to the ideals for which he lived and died.
 
We share a common memory of this man whose life continues to cast a "lovely light" across the landscape and into the dark corners of our life together in America. I have a personal memory of Dr. King that has played an important role in defining my journey in the civil rights movement.
 
Near the end of my third year in seminary at Emory University in Atlanta, I was a student-pastor of a circuit of four churches near Phenix City, Alabama. I commuted to Emory each Monday and returned each weekend to serve my churches.One Friday night in early 1955 I received a call from my mentor, the Rev. Welton Gregory. He said, "Tom, I want you to be in Montgomery at 7:30 tomorrow morning. A group of us are going Talladega to spend the day with a young black Baptist minister who has just been called to be pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery.  We believe his is going to have a creative influence in race relations in Alabama. His name is Martin Luther King, Jr."
 
I tried in vain to explain my situation to Rev. Gregory. I told him that I had just gotten home from Emory and I had lots of work waiting on me. He dismissed each excuse I made.  Finally he said to me, "This is a very important meeting.  I expect you to be here at 7:30 in the morning." With that he hung up the telephone, and I was there at 7:30 the next morning.
 
About a dozen of us spent that day with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ten months before the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  Dr. King was the first educated black person I had ever met. I do not quite know how to describe what I thought and felt during that unforgettable experience. I can say that I felt something begin to crumble in my heart and mind as the residue of a multitude of accumulated prejudices of a life-time began to melt away. I had never met a more intelligent, articulate, and gentle man in my life. He was completely at ease with a dozen white clergy. We had lunch together and spent about 3 hours listening to Dr. King and discussing the racial problems in Alabama.
 
Little did we realize as we traveled home that afternoon that we had been breaking bread with a man who would radically alter the socio-political landscape of the country in the next dozen years, and who would be gunned down before he was 40 years old.  I shudder when I remember that I almost missed that meeting!
 
We tend to forget the extent to which Dr. King was interested and involved in those related issues that were the spawn of racism. Racism is not singular. It reaches its ugly tentacles into so many related areas. Dr. King understood this. 
 
In December 1955 Dr. King accepted leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association and led a bus boycott that stunned the city and made headlines across the nation. But he did not stop there. He saw the larger picture. He went on to lead the fight to integrate lunch counters in Birmingham, the waiting rooms in bus and train stations and doctor's offices. There were "sit-ins" in churches.Segregated public school, colleges and universities were integrated. Racism was everywhere. He pushed the movement from social integration to economic justice. Dr. King addressed unemployment and underemployment of black people. He was concerned that black people were economically marginalized.  He wanted black people to have a chance for advancement based on character and competence, not color.
 
When Dr. King was killed, he was in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting a strike by one of the poorest and most humble classes of the working poor - garbage collectors.
 
His legacy belongs to all of us of every race and class. We are all the richer that he lived. He grows taller and his light shines brighter each year. We will be remembering the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. long after the names of his enemies have disappeared into the dustbin of history to be remembered no more.

Violence and Vengeance

by Dr. Thomas Lane Butts
 
Considering the prevalence of violence in the world today one cannot help but wonder if we have made any progress toward living together in peace since the Ice Age. We have evolved from a time in which violence was the norm in the human effort to survive in a hostile world. Violence seems to be genetic. Progress toward civilization has been slow and uneven. Sigmund Freud in his "Civilization and its Discontents" opined that "The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization". But it is obvious that civilization has never entirely given up hurling stones.  Peace and civility are fragile conditions. We revert to earlier levels of development with disturbing frequency.  C.P. Snow said that there is not much "between us and the terrible underneath, just about a coat of varnish". Scratch the skin of any of us and there is a savage underneath, ever so near the surface.
 
We have developed new and sophisticated weapons of violence. And it is not just better guns and bigger bombs, there is the more elusive systemic violence, often in the form of governmental tyranny. The violence of verbal and emotional abuse is sometimes more damaging, and far more difficult to identify, than physical violence. The rhetoric of violence can be heard on the street corners, in the interaction of family members and even in popular songs. Children learn violence early. Psychologist B.F. Skinner said, "Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless". The loss of civility, a growing disrespect for the law, and the weakened influence of religion have left us without some of the most essential boundaries for human behavior. In the absence of effective restrains to the dark underside of human nature incivility and antisocial behavior become the accepted norm for society and civilization is diminished. 
 
There has always been mind-numbing violence, but it has never been so palpable. And violence appears to be attached more and more to vengeance. Every act of violence as revenge for some past act of violence becomes the excuse for the next act of violence. It is an endless vicious cycle until someone stops it by refusing to retaliate.
 
In his book, "The Immense Journey", Loren Eiseley has an interesting suggestion for taming the violence in us.

"The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger, and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep."

Eiseley then relates a scary experience he once had.

I once sat, a prisoner, long ago, and watched a peasant soldier just recently equipped with a submachine gun swing the gun slowly in line with my body. It was a beautiful weapon and his finger toyed hesitantly with the trigger. Suddenly to possess all that power and then to be forbidden to use it must have been almost too much for the man to contain. I remember, also, a protesting female voice nearby - the eternal civilizing voice of women who know that men are fools and children, and irresponsible. Sheepishly the peon slowly dropped the gun muzzle away from my chest. The black eyes looked out at me a little wicked, and a little desirous of better understanding.
 
"'Thompson, Tome'- son', he repeated proudly, slapping the barrel. I nodded a little weakly, relaxing with a sigh. After all, we were men together and understood this great subject of destruction. And was I not a citizen of the country that had produced this wonderful mechanism? So I nodded again and said carefully after him, 'Thompson, Tome' - son', Bueno, si, muy bueno.' We looked at each other then,smiling a male smile that ran all the way back to the Ice Age."

Will we ever be able to tame that propensity to violence which runs so deep in human nature? Perhaps not - at least not until we hear, understand, and begin to live by the philosophy taught by an old friend of ours in what is called "The Sermon on the Mount". (Matthew, chapters 5-7) Let us pray for that understanding of reality to become increasingly known and followed by individuals and nations. Our lives and the existence of civilization as we know it may well depend upon it.

Jamis Is Here

by Dr. Thomas Lane Butts

Western culture owes much to the Greeks and Romans. Philosophy, Christian Theology, and our judicial system, for instance, are much indebted to Athens and Rome. Greek and Roman mythology permeates the English vocabulary. Our calendar is Roman. The first month of the year, January, is named for the Roman god, Janus, who is guardian of portals and patron of beginnings and endings. He is shown as having two faces, one in front, and the other at the back of his head. The symbolism is that the first month of the year is a time for reviewing the past and contemplating the future.
 
Many people are hesitant about looking back because of painful experiences in the past. Leroy "Satchel" Paige, the clever baseball player, in a Collier Magazine article in 1953 titled "Time Ain't Gonna Mess with Me", gave us that much quoted quip: "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you". There are people whose life experiences are such that they feel something dangerous from the past is forever closing in on them. It is axiomatic that being preoccupied with the past may endanger one's future welfare. There is some truth in the "Satchel Paige Philosophy", but it is not the whole truth. It should be heard with one ear. Inattention to the past can cause us to repeat old mistakes that present themselves in new forms. George Santayana warned, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". Perhaps it would be better to listen to the wise warning of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who, in the preface of "The Gulag Archipelago", said: "Dwell on the past and you will lose one eye. Forget the past and you will lose both eyes".
 
Thinking of history as linear rather than circular is a more positive way of looking at reality. There are aspects of history which tend to be repeated, but let us hope that not all history will be repeated. That is too much determinism! Journalist, Norman Cousins, was on target when he said, "History is a vast early warning system". That is true in both world and personal history. We cannot change the past, although many people spend considerable time and effort trying. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam has a quatrain that addresses our predicament with regard to the past.
 
    "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
    Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
    Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
    Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it"
 
It is easy to speak authoritatively of the past because it is the one aspect of life about which we have 20/20 vision. Not so with the future. Even the people who are best trained in the science of predicting the future (if it can be called a science) are often wrong. There are too many variables and too much that is unexpected to allow reliable accuracy. It is like weather forecasting. Patrick Young said, "The trouble with weather forecasting is that it is right too often to ignore, and wrong too often to rely on it". Even using our best information and judgment about life is like that. The only sure thing about the future is that it will surprise even the most perceptive.
 
We do not know what is going to happen in our lives tomorrow, or next week, or next year. In one of her novels, Sue Grafton begins with a strange and interesting paragraph that reminds us of this fact.
 
 "Sometimes I think how odd it would be to catch a glimpse of the future - a quick view of events lying in store for us at some undisclosed date. Suppose we could peer through a tiny peephole in time and chance upon a flash of what was coming up in the years ahead. Some moments we see would make no sense at all and some, I suspect, would frighten us beyond endurance. Time, of course, only runs in one direction, and it seems to do so in an orderly progression. Here in the blank and stony present we are shielded from the
knowledge of events that await us, protected from knowledge of the future by blind ignorance."
 
The book of Ecclesiastes puts it more succinctly. "God has made everything to suit its time; moreover God has given us a sense of time past and future, but we cannot see what God is doing from the beginning to end". (Ecclesiastes 3:9-11) We are pilgrims, ignorant of how it all began and blind to how it will end. Our only beacon is faith in that transcendent being by whose hand we came into the world unaided by any effort of our own. And, we are dependent upon that same being for a safe exit.
 
As we squint into the foggy future with the forward-looking face of Janus, get ready for some surprises. Some of them will be good surprises - and some will be scary. Draw on the past for wisdom, trust God for what you cannot see, and play the hand you are dealt as best you can.
 
Several years ago, physicist Edward Teller,reputed to be the father of the hydrogen bomb, summed up the human predicament rather well when he opined, "Life improves slowly, goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible".
 
Get ready for the future. It is coming whether we are ready for it or not. Remember Janus - look both ways, and then keep on trucking.

Twas The Week After Christmas

By Dr. Thomas Lane Butts

Now that the "Big Day" is over and we are trying to get back to normal, whatever that may be, perhaps we should try to figure out how to keep some of Christmas in our lives. People tend to feel "let down" after such an intense celebration.  It takes intentional effort to keep the spirit of Christmas alive when it is over. So many things mitigate against it.  Several years ago Howard Thurman wrote a free-verse poem about taking Christmas beyond December 25th.
 
"When the song of the angel is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home. When the shepherds are back with their flocks;

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations, to bring peace among people, to make music in the heart..."
 
Most of the baubles we got or gave are soon gone, forgotten or stored out of sight in the attic. What we actually keep from the season are the intangibles. There is the spirit of excited joy we experienced/shared with the children who were too young and innocent to worry about mundane things like paying off credit cards and balancing the budget. There remains the joy of seeing the older children come home from college or distant work places, and seeing how they have grown and changed (hopefully for the better). There is the lingering memory of having extended members of our family of origin get together to swap grandiose tales of how things were when they were growing up. For many years my family of origin got together at the old home place where we grew up during the depression. We would celebrate the fact that we were all still alive and of sound mind (relatively speaking). We would recite embellished and polished gems of oral tradition about the good old days which were so hard -- and so good. But times change. Death and distance have left my family of origin, and perhaps yours, with only the memories we struggle to keep.
 
Christmas is not a happy time for everyone. There are people who, for unspoken reasons, are glad that Christmas is over. They are weary of pretending to be happy when deep down they are sad. They have felt trapped by the common expectations of the season and the expectations of others, and have feigned as best they could a "holiday spirit". We all know someone for whom this was the first Christmas after some significant loss such as death, divorce or one of the many other ways you can lose someone or something. There are those whose historical losses, failures and feelings of brokenness float to the surface at Christmas time, and they find themselves reliving some of the worst experiences of their past. And, then there are also some whose memories of "Christmases past" are just not happy. Be gentle and careful when you relate to people who morph into modern-day Scrooges. There are more of them than you think, and the reasons for their seasonal brittleness may be more complex than you can imagine.
 
This week between Christmas and the beginning of a new year is a good time to remember resolutions and promises made to ourselves, God, and other people. Did you keep the promises, or will you need to try again? Let me tell you a story of someone who kept his promise.
 
It was the day after Christmas at a church in San Francisco. As the pastor of the church was looking at the Nativity scene in the narthex and getting ready to store it until the next year, he noticed that the baby Jesus figure was missing from the manger. He went outside and saw a little boy pulling a red wagon down the street. The baby Jesus figure was in the red wagon. He walked up to the child and asked, "Son, where did you get that baby Jesus?” The little boy said, "I got him from the church." "Why did you take him?", the pastor asked. The little boy replied, "Well about a week before Christmas I prayed and told Jesus that if he would bring me a red wagon for Christmas, I would give him a ride!”
 
May we all be so faithful to our promises -- each in our own way.

Where Is The Christ Of Christmas

by Dr. Thomas Lane Butts
 
We almost never encounter God when, where, or how we thought we might. Divine encounters usually come as a surprise, fully recognized as an epiphany after the fact. We are like Jacob, in days of old, who experienced a divine encounter as he slept in the open with a stone for a pillow. God spoke to him in a dream, and when he awoke from his sleep, he said, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it" (Genesis 28:16). After the death of Jesus, two of his saddened followers were on their way home to Emmaus, a village seven miles from Jerusalem. A stranger joined them on the way. They were so betaken with his wisdom and understanding that when they arrived at Emmaus they persuaded him to stay with them for the evening meal. When he was at table with them, he took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them. Immediately they realized that the stranger was the risen Jesus.  When they recognized him, he vanished out of their sight (Luke 24:13-32).
 
God is subtle. Samuel Miller reminds us that, "We never see God directly. God is mediated to us by the very things that seem to deny him".  A woman at the Sojourners Community in Washington, D.C., prayed before each food distribution, "O Lord, we know you will be passing through this line today. Make us gracious servants whether we recognize you or not".
 
As we look for Jesus during this holy season, let me share a poem by Edwin Markham that may be helpful. It is entitled, "How the Great Guest Came". This poem suggests how we may find the Christ of Christmas. It is a "story poem" about a simple cobbler in a European village many years ago. His faith was so palpable, and he was so beloved by all who knew him, that when he died they built a cathedral where his cobbler shop had been.
 
Before the cathedral in grandeur rose at Ingelburg where the Danube goes;
Before the forest of silver spires went airily up in the clouds and fires;
Before the oak had ready a beam, while yet the arch was stone and dream --
There where the altar was later laid, Conrad, the cobbler, plied his trade.
 
It happened one day at the year's white end, two neighbors called on their old-time friend;
And they found the shop, so meager and mean, made gay with a hundred boughs of green.
Conrad was stitching with face ashine, but suddenly stopped as he twitched a twine:
"Old friends, good news! At dawn today, as the cocks were scaring the night away,
The Lord appeared in a dream to me, and said, 'I am coming your Guest to be!'
So I have been busy with feet astir, strewing the floor with branches of fir.
The wall is washed and the shelf is shined, and over the rafter the holly is twined.
He comes today, and the table is spread with milk and honey and wheaten bread."
 
His friends went home, and his face grew still as he watched for the shadow across the sill.
He lived all the moments o'er and o'er, when the Lord should enter the lowly door--
The knock, the call, the latch pulled up, the lighted face, the offered cup.
He would wash the feet where the spikes had been, he would kiss the hands where the nails went in,
Then at last would sit with Him and break the bread as the day grew dim.
 
While the cobbler mused there passed his pane a beggar drenched by the driving rain.
He called him in from the stony street and gave him shoes for his bruised feet.
The beggar went and there came a crone, her face with wrinkles of sorrow sown.
A bundle of fagots bowed her back, and she was spent with wrench and rack.
He gave her his loaf and steadied her load as she took her way on the weary road.
Then to his door came a little child, lost and afraid in the world so wild,
In the big, dark world. Catching it up, he gave it the milk in the waiting cup,
And led it home to its mother's arms, out of the reach of the world's alarms.
 
The day went down in the crimson west and with it the hope of the blessed Guest,
And Conrad sighed as the world turned gray: "Why is it, Lord, that your feet delay?

Did you forget that this was the day?" Then soft in the silence a Voice he heard:
 
"Lift up your heart, for I kept my word.
Three times I came to your friendly door;
Three times was my shadow on your floor.
I was the beggar with bruised feet;
I was the woman you gave to eat;
I was the child on the homeless street!"
 
I hear a Voice saying: "If you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me".
 
Can you hear that Voice? It is the Christ of Christmas!

He Came

by Dr. Thomas Lane Butts
 
Most of us have either read or heard the history of how and why the early Christians settled on December 25th as the date for celebrating the birth of Jesus. The entire story is too long and convoluted for a column. But, if you would like to hear the history again, or for the first time, come by and see me.
 
There are multiple reasons why we know Jesus was not born in December. For instance, shepherds did not "watch their flocks by night" in December, but in the spring of the year.  Jesus may have been born in 4 B.C. rather than in the zero midpoint between B.C. and A.D.  The dating of "Anno Domini" ("The Year of Our Lord") is also an interesting and convoluted piece of history. 
 
The specific details of the "when, where and how" concerning the birth of Jesus are of interest, and to some they are essentially important. And, I would not knowingly do anything to disturb the details people may hold as an essential part of their faith. The essential part of my own Christian faith construct, however, is not the historical details of when, where, and how Jesus came into the world, but simply that he came. Somewhere on or near the dividing line between B.C. and A.D. Jesus came into the world, and the world has never been the same. One night, in time and history, God slipped down the back stairs of heaven with a babe in his arms. Details may be vague, conflicting, and disputed, but among Christians the fact that he came is not in dispute. This is the centerpiece of the Christian faith.
 
The Bible teaches that Jesus came "at the right time". There are two words in Biblical Greek which sound very much alike, but they are very different. One of those words is "chronos", from which we get the words chronological and chronology. This is the timetable we know as twenty-four hours. It is clock and calendar time. The Bible seldom, if ever, uses chronos; its chief interest in in "kairos", which we understand as the right time, the opportune moment. It refers to something that happens at the "right time" without regard to what the clock or calendar may show. When the Bible speaks of Jesus coming "at the right time" the work kairos, not chronos is used. Biblically speaking, "kairos" is God's time.
 
It is very helpful to establish a specific time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, even if the exact time on the calendar is in dispute. We tend to complain about the commercial exploitation of Christmas. One theologian called Christmas "the disneyfication of Christianity". And, indeed, it is seriously exploited for profit. But let us not forget that it is also a time that is used for good by many. In this time of economic difficulty, when many families hardly have money for food, much less money for Christmas gifts, churches and service clubs, more than ever before, are collecting food and Christmas gifts for children to be given to financially strapped families. As we "warm" to the season, there is a certain spirit that comes over us. We want to give and become more like the one whose birth we celebrate. Contemporary Christmas celebration is not all bad!
 
It does not matter that there was not a lighted Christmas tree in Bethlehem in the stable when Jesus was born. It is not important that the idea of a Christmas tree comes from a pagan source. There is something about the lights and the decorations that seem to stifle our crass cynicism and bring out the best in us. Who can fail to see the sparkle in the eyes of little children, and the softened spirit in the eyes and attitudes of experience-hardened adults when Christmas lights shine in the darkness?
 
We are reminded that someone important came into our world "at the right time", and that he is still here, and we are the better for it.

Bethlehem or Bedlam

by Dr. Thomas Lane Butts
 
In an article published in 1996, English Theologian, Don Cupitt, said that "Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity". I winced when I read that characterization of Christmas. It hurt because it contains an embarrassing element of truth. Almost all of us participate in the commercialization of Christmas.
 
In the rush to meet the deadline of December 25th, there is nothing we will hear more often than expressions of exhaustion, and nothing we will see more than increasing chaos. The chaos is not only in the traffic and the milling masses in the malls, it is in the frustrated lives of people who are spending money they cannot afford to part with to buy gifts that people do not need and/or want. Surely the Lord, God Almighty, and his Son Jesus, never intended for life to be like that, especially on a holiday built around a holy day. Let me tell you a story.
 
In the year of 1247, the Roman Catholic Church built a hospital in London which was named "St. Mary of Bethlehem". It was a good hospital, and within two generations it had gained considerable prominence as one of the few hospitals in Europe where the mentally ill were treated like sick human beings instead of animals. When Henry the Eighth seized all the property of the Roman Catholic Church in 1536, St. Mary of Bethlehem was completely converted into a mental hospital accommodating some 50 or 60 patients.  Soon the hospital changed its philosophy and degenerated into a holding pen where mentally ill people were warehoused, abused and belittled.
 
Down through the years the English people contracted the name of the hospital from "St. Mary of Bethlehem" to simply "Bethlehem".  In the dead of the night residents living near the hospital could hear the distressed cries and clamor of the mentally ill patients.  Over time people contracted "Bethlehem" to "Bedlam" as a slang term for the hospital.  Thus the beautiful idea of "St. Mary of Bethlehem" as a place for the humane treatment of the ill devolved into a place where the weak were abused and neglected, a place that spawned a new word --"Bedlam" -- a word we continue to use today to mean confusion and chaos. 
 
We human beings seem to have a way of taking something given to us for "good" and turning it into something perverse. "Bethlehem" becomes "Bedlam", a cradle becomes a cross, and God's gracious gesture of love is taken as an intrusion into our way of life.
 
At first blush God's ways seem so incongruous. They are so strangely foreign to our view of reality and so different from how we might have chosen to do something. A 13th century Spanish King by the name of Alphonse the Wise was shown a hand-cranked mechanism that demonstrated  Ptolemy's theory of planetary movements. After studying the device and the astronomical theory it represented, Alphonse remarked, "Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe". 
We almost always think that things would have come off working better had God consulted us before acting.
 
God's ways seem strange in our view of reality. In the Book of Isaiah (55:8-9), we are cautioned, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts".
 
Bethlehem was God's idea of how to get the message of truth across to the world. We would have never thought of doing it like that!
 
After World War Two, a French soldier suffering amnesia was sent to his home town. When he got off the train, he looked at the people at the station and said, "I do not know who I am". Because he had been so disfigured by facial wounds, three families claimed him as belonging to them. So, he was taken to one village after another  and allowed to walk around by himself.  Finally, he entered a village and a light of recognition came into his eyes. He walked unerringly down a side street, through a little gate, and up the steps to his father's house.  The old familiar surroundings restored his memory, and once again, he knew who he was and where he belonged.
 
We are like amnesia victims in a shell-shocked world.  We have forgotten who we are and where we belong until we get to Bethlehem.  But in Bethlehem we unerringly make our way down a side street where a star stands over a manger, and we suddenly know we have found the way home. We know we are at the only place where we can be saved from our insanity and the bedlam of our man-made world, the only place where we can claim our true identity.  Bethlehem is where we belong.  It is the place where God stands in the doorway of the world and speaks a language we understand.
 
Many years ago the great preacher, Phillips Brooks, spent Christmas in Bethlehem. While there he wrote a hymn we love to sing, which gives the right perspective of this holiday season, the purpose of which is to honor the great event of God coming into our world.
 
"O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie;
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by,
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light;
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
 
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given;
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in."  30

The Lessons of History

by Dr. Thomas Lane Butts
 
One of the most treasured books in my library is a 100-page tome entitled the "Lessons of History", written in 1968 by Will and Ariel Durant. I have read and reread it and referenced it in many sermons, columns and essays. It is a profound book which should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the great lessons of history by the century rather than by the year. History really makes more sense that way.
 
In the introduction which is entitled, "Hesitations", the Durants engage is some self-deprecation. "It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed."
 
Not everyone holds history in such high regard as the Durants, and even those who do express deep concern that nations and governments do not seem to learn from it. Both Edward Gibbon and Voltaire regarded history as little more than a record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of humankind. Samuel T. Coleridge regarded history as important, but decried our failure to learn from it. He said, " Passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us". The German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel opines that "What experience and history teach us is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on any lessons they might have drawn from it". In his book, "Man's Unconquerable Mind", historian Gilbert Highet wrote, "People who know no history always learn wrong history, and can never understand the passing moment as it changes into history". Norman Cousins succintly reminded us that "History is a vast early warning system". 
 
The great historian, Charles A. Beard, (1874-1948), was once asked if he could summarize the lessons of history in a short book. He said he could do it in four sentences. This is what he wrote.
 
  1. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power.
  2, The mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small.
  3. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
  4. When it is dark enough you can see all the stars.
 
Only a fool would dare to offer a commentary on those four profound statements. I proceed.
 
1. WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY THEY FIRST MAKE MAD WITH POWER. There is no temptation more attractive or dangerous than the temptation to exert power. In a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, English historian Lord Acton wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The workshop floor of history is strewn with the broken remnants of tyrants for whom the thirst for power was an obsession: the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Emperors of Rome, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler and Tojo - to name a few. And, there are a significant number of contemporary candidates for that appellation. Disastrous wars are often waged for weak, uninformed and/or egocentric reasons by powerful people who chose to proceed without the wise counsel of history. When England and Argentina were in a war over the Falkland Islands, Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, borrowed a proverbial phrase to describe his view of the situation. He said, "The Falkland thing is like a fight between two bald men over a comb". However, the obsession for power is not confined to the infamous or larger than life arenas. You can see the same dynamic in much smaller kingdoms such as state, county, and local political persons. Most insidious of all, this love affair with power and its bedfellow, the need to control, is found in many families where one member tries to dominate all other members. The axiom that he who loves the least has the most power is perhaps more universally true than most people imagine.  History teaches us to restrain our thirst for power.
 
2.  THE MILLS OF THE GODS GRIND SLOWLY, YET THEY GRIND EXCEEDINGLY SMALL.  Perhaps the Apostle Paul offers the most salient commentary on the justice of God. "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap." (Galatians 6:7) God does not settle accounts at the end of every day, but in time God settles all accounts, down to the smallest detail. Let tyrants take notice.
 
3. THE BEE FERTILIZES THE FLOWER IT ROBS. There is a delicate, and sometimes, mysterious ecological balance in nature which we should not only see but respect.  There is a connectedness in the structure of the universe that is not always visible to the natural eye or factored into decisions made in the name of progress. Poet, Francis Thompson wrote, "Thou canst not stir a flower without troubling a star".
 
4. WHEN IT IS DARK ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE ALL THE STARS.  We lament the losses which darken our lives. In the book, "Life Lessons" by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler,  Dr. Kubler-Ross writes, "In many ways, if life is a school, loss is a major part of the curriculum".  She points our that, "we eventually lose everything we have, yet what ultimately matters can never be lost".  It has been suggested that there are no accidents in life. Everything has its meaning in the larger scheme of things, though this is often hard to see except in retrospect. Many people never see the meaning of life until their world is in total eclipse.  We never see all the stars until it is dark.  The darkness we so much dread may save us from an even greater tragedy - blind meaninglessness.  When we get beyond the paralyzing sadness and grief of a loss we often find that the darkness is not an enemy but a friend. We do not see that quickly, and we do not see it every day, but that understanding of reality begs to be seen.
 
 Class is in session.  Look, listen and learn.

Help And Hope

by Dr. Thomas Lane Butts

When I was growing up in a rural community in South Alabama during the Depression we used to sing many old hymns that are not in current hymnals. While looking for an appropriate thought for Thanksgiving Day, I remembered one of those hymns we sang frequently, "Help Somebody Today". It begins with this line, "Look all around you, find someone in need, help somebody today". It continues by suggesting in simple, direct, and heartfelt words some of the many ways we can reach out and help somebody. That hymn made a lasting impression on me.
 
As I look back on my struggle with ignorance and meager resources as I worked to get an education in preparation for Christian Ministry, I realize how close I came to giving up, and, indeed, would have given up had it not been for the gracious people who helped me make it, against all odds. I have a profound sense of gratitude for all the people who encouraged and helped me. Without them I certainly would never have made it into the ministry.
 
In the fall of 1948 I hitchhiked 20 miles to Evergreen, Alabama, took a Greyhound bus to Auburn, Alabama, and enrolled as a freshman in the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (later named Auburn University). I had $75., cash money, with which I planned to attend school for a year. I was naive and ignorant, thank God. If I had been wise in the ways of the world I would kept my $20.00 a week summer job and never attempted to get an education. But with the help of friends and a few minor miracles, I made it into the Ministry.
 
There was an elderly man in our community, known to us as "Uncle Alf". He was a widower. I don't think he could read or write. He traveled about in a buggy pulled by an old grey mule. Uncle Alf took an interest in my education for the ministry. He was poor, but thoughtful and generous. Each time I came home from school, he would fish around in his coin purse and find a quarter or a fifty cent piece and give it to me, saying "Tommy, maybe this will 'hope' you out. He always used the word "hope" or "hopien" instead of "help". I felt pretty educated by the end of my first quarter at Auburn, in fact, I felt more educated then than I have ever felt since. I chuckled to myself at Uncle Alf's misuse of language, but his sincere generosity was a powerful source of encouragement. I wanted to correct his word usage, but never had the heart to do so, thanks to another of the minor miracles that have graced my life.
 
Many years later, while doing an in-depth study of the evolution of the English language, I discovered something that made me ever so glad that I never had the nerve to correct Uncle Alf's word usage. In Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, the words "hope, hopen, and hopien" were the words commonly and correctly used for "help". Uncle Alf was using the very finest and most basic old English. My word "help" was late and modern English. By some strange turn of events this old man had retained in his vocabulary a word that went back a thousand years. I blushed to think how close I came to making a fool of myself.
 
It is interesting that "hope" and "help" are interchangeable. It makes sense. Anyone who has ever been helped knows that help IS hope.
 
In the middle of the winter quarter of my first year in college I completely ran out of money. I didn't have a nickel to buy a coca-cola. I was living in a Methodist Parsonage with the Rev. Charlie Mathison, a student pastor of a circuit of churches just outside Auburn. There were three of us living there. I had already packed my clothes that cold January night and had asked Charlie to drive me out to the main highway the next day so I could hitch-hike home. We were all single and we shared household duties. It was my night to wash dishes, and I was standing at the sink finishing up when Charlie came through the back door, walked behind me and reached over my shoulder, slipped something into my shirt pocket, and kept walking. I dried my hands and reached to see what he had put in my pocket. It was a twenty dollar bill. That was a lot of money!! I ran after him protesting that I could not take it because I had no way of repaying him. He said that it was not a loan but a gift. I asked where he got it and he said "It's none of your business".  I unpacked by bags.  If I had gone home my educational career and my dream of going into the Ministry would have been over.  Help and hope came to me in the same gesture. That was long before I knew that the two words, help and hope, were the same.  That was not the first time someone "hope" me out, and certainly was not the last.
 
Years later I tried to repay the twenty dollars, but Charlie would not accept it. He repeated, "It was not a loan, it was a gift".  There are some things you can never repay, but you can pass it on. I have given that twenty dollar bill to literally hundreds of students in the past 60 years of my ministry, and I have still not repaid it.  Charlie's twenty dollar bill is a gift that keeps on giving.
 
Help somebody today. It may start something that will still be giving even after you are no longer living.