When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God’s Presence

Accomplishing Christmas - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

What are the little things that make it Christmas for you? What has shaped your perceptions of Christmas – of what it’s supposed to be? Likely, it’s a combination of your personal experiences and the ways the holiday has been presented to you by your culture growing up – what was on tv or the radio, what commercials or movies you remember, what foods your grandmother made.  
For me it’s watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and A Christmas Story. My dad on the roof putting up the lights, getting a real Christmas tree, singing carols, the little plastic Santa that sat on our front porch all lit up from within, getting dark early, the smell of cigarettes  and taste of lemon bars and fudge at my grandma’s house where we had our annual Christmas Eve party. A well decorated shopping mall with way too many people. These things make it feel like Christmas to me. 
I love the movie Christmas Vacation. I watch it every year. This year our middle child was finally old enough to watch it: A rite of passage in our family. Actually, to say I love Christmas Vacation is sort of irrelevant. Love is beside the point: It’s a part of how I experience Christmas. I saw it in the theater in December of 1989 with my family. I was 10 years old. I have seen it at least once nearly every year since then. It’s not Christmas until the lights on the Griswold’s house blind the neighbors. This movie has shaped my very perception of what Christmas is supposed to be. How could it not? 

Pursuit - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

About ten years ago I was working with this therapist and it was a very good fit. She and I had both grown up in similar religious, geographical, and cultural contexts, and we both had come to similar places in our relationships with those things. Which is to say I felt heard and understood, and she was able to speak a language to me that didn’t need a lot of translation. I learned a lot from her about life and about myself. But the thing she taught me that may stick with me the most – at least on a conscious level – was something about God. 
I was speaking with her about the pursuit of perfection: My desire to get everything right, to be the right kind of person, and specifically my belief that I needed to make all the right choices in order to be that right kind of person. I wanted to get it right, you know. And I wanted to get it right for God. It seemed like the least I could do. But I put a lot of pressure on myself to do that: To get it right for God, to make the right choices for God. To be the person God thought I could be. I was not able to see what a burden I was placing on myself in all this. But my therapist saw it.  
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Expectations - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

So there I was last Sunday putting up Christmas lights. It was the first week of Advent. I had spent the morning preaching at church. Now I was in my front yard. I was on a ladder. I had my Christmas mega playlist of over 500 of my favorite holiday themed songs set to shuffle on a speaker on the porch. I had the Santa hat on. And I was miserable. I could barely hear the music over how much I was cussing to myself. It was cold. My hands were numb if I wore no gloves, but when I put the gloves on I could not manage the lights. My family had given up and were inside drinking hot chocolate. I didn’t even want to hear the songs that were coming on. Merry Christmas indeed.  
Expectations will kill you. Every time. 
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Eating and Working - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

We do not and cannot hear the Bible in a vacuum. We are living in a time when our country is radically reducing support for those who are poor and struggling. We are seeing this most drastically with the federal attack on SNAP funding – our primary food assistance program for those in need. The threads of the social safety net are actively being cut. More and more people are finding themselves on the margins of society, and once there, they are finding less help than ever before. Some careless, clueless Christian leaders will even use the text from 2 Thessalonians to support this action. 
Much of the rhetoric around reduction and removal of this kind of assistance is that it incentivizes people not to work – that essentially people are lazy and these programs reward their laziness. Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. This is an age-old and pernicious characterization that allows us to distance ourselves from those in need, allows us to conveniently sidestep our mutual belonging, our responsibility to one another. 
It also ignores reality. 
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Render unto Caesar - Part 2 - The Antidote to Contempt - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Regardless of how Jesus responds, it is essential for us to recognize and name this: The question itself is disingenuous. It is not asked with sincerity. It is not asked with respect. It is not asked out of curiosity. It is not asked with the desire to engage for the sake of a deeper understanding of how Jesus’ mind works. The challengers seek only to trap Jesus, to shut him down, to disprove him. He is not a sibling, friend, or conversation partner: He is a threat. They posture themselves as wanting to sit at Jesus’ feet and learn, but the narrator lets us know ahead of time that this is pure pretense. They are acting in bad faith.  
We are well acquainted in our own time with disingenuity in disagreement. We are quite capable of recognizing bad faith questions disguised as debate.  
Argument and debate are important parts of relationships and of living in a society. But not all argument is created equal. There is a marked difference between trying to reach an understanding and trying to win. In one, the goal is to know one another better and find a place of connection – even in disagreement. In the other, the goal is to be right and prove the other wrong. That’s it. 
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Render Unto Caesar - Part 1 - Non Partisan Jesus - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

In any case, it’s certainly not a straight answer, as centuries of varied interpretations attest.  
This anecdote is often seen as Jesus refusing to engage in politics. He declines to clearly answer an explicitly political question, and his riddle of an answer has the whiff of separating church from state. This text then is often used by Christians as a way of discouraging the mix of religion and politics. It is especially used by Christians when another Chrisitan is espousing a political perspective that makes us uncomfortable. 
Please understand that the question posed to Jesus is not asked genuinely – and I will say/write more about that next week. But it is worth saying here that the question is not asked with a desire for understanding Jesus’ perspective: It is a trap. Whichever way Jesus answers is problematic. Not because it is political, but because it is partisan. For Jesus to answer in either direction would put him in a category with a specific existing political constituency. To radically oversimplify things for our current context, the ones asking the question are doing something akin to getting Jesus to tell them if he is a Republican or a Democrat. Those who confront Jesus aren’t seeking his wisdom, aren’t interested in learning from him: They want to know which group to put him in so that he can be more easily classified, managed, and dismissed.  
 
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The Profits of Outrage - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

This week's episode of When Love Shows Up explores the role of outrage in media consumption, tracing its evolution from the days of Howard Stern’s controversial radio show to the present era dominated by social media. Rev. Phil reflects on how media companies profit from keeping audiences engaged through provocative content. He examines the addictive nature of outrage and its implications for our social interactions and mental well-being. Drawing on Christian principles, he advocates for a community centered on love and human connection as an antidote to the divisive and profit-driven nature of current media practices.
 
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Sorrow and Hope and Chicken Jockey - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

While we were memorializing our beloved, millions of people were marching and demonstrating in cities across the country. Every record of this event I saw showed grieving and laughter in potent coexistence. Homemade signs that embody rage and humor. Sorrow and hope - neither strangers nor enemies. For these millions, disillusionment with our present reality has not undermined a belief in what can be, in what we can be. It is a mighty love that produces such sorrow and hope. A hope that does not acknowledge sorrow is all artifice and denial. But a sorrow without hope? I don’t want to know it and neither do you. We are built for hope. 
The next day, we drove through 6 hours of rain to get home to our children. I reached the front door exhausted and held onto them for dear life. It is such a cliché to say my children give me hope. But clichés are clichés for a reason, aren’t they? It is not my kids’ innocence I love – in all honesty I don’t consider them all that innocent. Children experience anger and shame and fear and sorrow and joy and all sorts of what we call “big feelings” just as much as adults do. They’re clueless and naïve and idealistic and wholehearted, but I do not worship or idealize them.  

To Be a Blessing - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Blessing does not exist in a vacuum. Blessing does not exist solely as a reward for good behavior. Blessing is a calling. Blessing is a vocation. The reason Abraham is blessed is so that he will be empowered to bless others. The land he is given is meant to provide a homeland for a whole people. His name is meant to be great so that he can use it to help others. His children and children’s children are meant to facilitate and embody God’s love and blessing  to the whole world – to all the families of the earth. 
I often struggle with the temptation to make myself the center of my own life. I am thinking about how my life will turn out. What will come my way, what will I accomplish. I want to be blessed in practical ways like Abraham, and like so many others I’ve known. Who wouldn’t want that? But I am not the center of the universe, and I should not be the center of my own life. As a Christian, I am supposed to place God at the center of my life – but I have to tell you that doesn’t mean I’m supposed to be a holy roller who is, as one old song goes,  so heavenly minded that I’m no earthly good.  
No, the Christian is commanded to center God by serving God’s people – which to be clear is everyone. 

Abusive God - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

This is not Christian education. It is abuse.  
You know it’s abuse in your heart. Because if anyone – a spouse, a partner, a sibling, a friend - ever loved your best friend the way we are told God loves us, you’d tell them to run, and you’d be right.  
Spiritually abusive Christianity, however prevalent it may feel in today’s world, is not reflected in the life, words, and ministry of Jesus. If you are a Christian who is being taught you were born dead and undeserving of love, you are in an abusive relationship. If you are someone who has left the church because you could no longer digest such a violent, toxic message about yourself, your leaving was not apostasy: It was an act of love – it was you recognizing something sacred within yourself that deserves to be nourished. That is exactly what Jesus wants for you.