If you like free, fun music, Thank You, Christmas! is my self-produced, unusual, quirky little winter set of sings celebrating all things holidays. I’m sort of participating with the Advent Conspiracy on this, sharing a gift from my creativity. These songs aren’t typical holiday fare, but they are fun and spiritual. Please spread theword!

One of my professors for some sort of practicum (worship, I think) in seminary loved to talk about Advent. He was this prim and proper guy, a senior pastor of a big UMC church in the burbs of Washington DC. As we explored the theological meanings behind the seasons in the life of the church, he explained why his church community always did a service of healing around Christmas time.

I’m sort of paraphrasing here…

It’s our biggest service of the Christmas season - people love it, because most people’s lives are filled with chaos, pain, confusion, and loss. We invite people to come forward to be anointed with a bit of oil and prayed for by folks who love to pray. We always pray specifically for the things in their life that they want to lift up. It’s simple and powerful.

We forget that Jesus wasn’t born in a nice hospital on the good side of town. Jesus was born in a barn, surrounded by animal feces. He was literally born in crap.

That resonated with me, because I’m never quite sure what to do with stories of angelic messengers, shepherds, miraculous births, and jealous kings. Sure, there’s a lot of intriguing stuff in there, but we tend to lift up the scripture in our churches in reverent tones or dress it up with red and white trim. We forget the weirdness of them. We forget that the stories were about injustice and hardship - that God moved in people who didn’t have money, not even a ride (yep, no mention in any of the gospel stories of a donkey or horse for Mary or Joseph).

Out of that came some sort of hope that took flesh - a child who grew to be a man - a guy who people kept encountering in their lives, who said and did the most intriguing things, or who made them want to leave everything behind to follow. And he too died without money or status or power or privilege.

Look, I admit I am in a major place of privilege. I am typing this on my computer, with great internet access, electricity, and resources to pay for all of that - I get it. Maybe that’s why I need to remember - maybe that’s why every Christmas I still search for something a little different, be it a song or a story or a piece of art, that connects me back to that smelly stable where a young, poor family had a baby. Could that be the real smell of Christmas?

May that smell - the smell of oppression, injustice, violence, and hate in our world - move me from my comfortable place and into loving action.

nbjames:

@tcufrog05 during the children’s moment @edcc (Taken with Instagram at East Dallas Christian Church)

This blog post is a great read.

Part of my faith story is growing up in Anadarko, OK, a town with 41% white people and 41% Native Americans. I loved my small town church - a bunch of good, wonderful people - but we never did a thing with our Native American neighbors. “They had their churches; we have our churches.” Granted that America’s legacy of racism, genocide, and colonization is difficult for anyone to deal with (especially a small town church), I longed for a faith that took Jesus’ words a bit more seriously to love your neighbor as yourself.

This article hits the nail on the head. When we reduce our faith to only a private, isolated piety/set of practices, we lose what makes our faith significant in the first place. The question I’ve heard asked before at congregational transformation events - if your church got up and left town one day, would anyone in your community know? Another recent book (Candlelight) I read says that the church should be a gift to your community. Our hands and feet can become gifts to our neighbors, no matter where we are.

God IS love. So, love people, okay?

I try to spice things up for Advent with alternate advent tunes. I use them primarily in worship, but they’re just fun anyway. Still, I’d love some new ideas, so if you have any, please share.

Like:

“Let It Be” by the Beatles

“Christmas Song” by Dave Matthews Band

“From the Mouth of Gabriel” by Sufjan Stevens

“Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night

“All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles

What am I missing?

Haha!

… Yes?

Maybe time collapses into nothingness for God. Is God outside of time? Or within time? Or what? I wish I knew.

I think the first story indicates the immediate nature of God’s grace, which is supposed to stretch us. Here is a man who has done wrong, accepts that reality, and, in the end, recognizes Jesus. It’s an affirmation of faith. In other words, God’s grace isn’t dependent on a performance. That can be real unsettling in most modern ideas of justice. It’s straight mercy.

The second story may point to an early Christian idea that Jesus died, went down into Hell, and preached/lived/shared salvation to the very demonic beings of the universe. It’s an interesting idea, definitely, even if you don’t buy into it. Plus, Jesus was different after resurrection - he was solid (as guys like Thomas are invited to touch his hands) but he could pop up behind locked doors and disappear in an instant (Walk to Emmaus). The gospel story was trying to say that something unbelievable happened - Jesus was here and yet beyond. He was not resuscitated - he was resurrected! Mary might have clung to the idea that he was alive again, but really, Jesus had work yet to do. Was he between two realities? Two different planes of existence? Was he just making a pit stop on his way to heaven? I think it’s unclear, because it was likely a bit unclear and mysterious to first century Christians too.

Sorry it took so long to answer your question!

I’m still a tech nerd most days. I’m a fan of vintage computers and new shiny tech. I use my iPhone 4 everyday and enjoy an old dual-core G5 Powermac at home.

I like to get a nice long life out of any computer I own.

The challenge is that once a company abandons a platform, software usually follows suit. My G5 Powermac is an example. It works great and is plenty fast, but Leopard was the last operating system from Apple that supports this aging Mac. There’s still a lot of good software in the Mac world for this machine, but a bunch of applications I use are phasing out PowerPC support.

Someday soon, I will need to upgrade to a nice little Mac Mini or something.

But in the meanwhile, open source software is here to the rescue.

For example, web browsers for PowerPC Macs are a dying breed. With focus on faster Javascript performance and speed, speed, speed, there won’t be a version of Safari 5.1 and beyond for my computer. Camino is great, but it uses an older rendering engine that won’t be updated. Firefox has abandoned PowerPC entirely. Other browsers will follow suit as the WebKit engine is no longer updated for any PowerPC machine.

Enter TenFourFox - an open source PowerPC centric version of the latest Firefox, specially optimized for the Mac. It’s pretty great, keeping older machines up in the game for a while longer… even though it does indeed make some design tradeoffs that require workarounds (no flash/no plugins).

This is, in my opinion, the strength of open source software - the power of community over corporate decisions. For a while longer, old PowerPC machines have life. As long as vintage Mac users have resources and time, open source software at least provides the opportunity for outdated machines to be relevant.

This is why open source software is pretty cool, in my opinion.

But… it doesn’t always work. You can practically name on one hand the number of open source software packages that are actually good. (There are lots on the server side of thing, by the way.) On the desktop, you end up mostly with bad clones of popular commercial packages, like Libre Office/Open Office (Microsoft Office) and GIMP (Photoshop).

Now don’t get me wrong - I love the idea of these applications - free alternatives for work, home, and business. But, they still got to be good… or at least good enough.

LibreOffice is the offshoot of Open Office that supposedly had big bug fixes for speed and usability. Guess what? It’s bloated, slow, disorganized, and disappointing. I’ve tried to write papers in it, but it offers no upgrade over any version of Microsoft Office. (For a Mac user, Microsoft Office 2004 or any version of iWork trounces it easily. Heck, go get Bean - a small, fast, well-designed basic word processor done right.)

GIMP is an alternative to Photoshop but only in desire. It’s a terrible, disorganized application that teases you with great features but ultimately is very limited. Just the other day, I attempted to use GIMP to do something as common place as converting an RGB image into a CMYK format. There is no CMYK support for GIMP, just convoluted workarounds. A waste of an experience.

Yes, these kinds of things provide a glimpse of a future where technology and software are available for lots of people, even those without financial resources to afford them. It’s a great movement and effort, but it needs more polish. Open source projects still need lots of vision and direction. In the case of TenFourFox, I think it works. In the case of numerous others, there is work to be done.

Meanwhile, the good people at Low End Mac keep fighting the fight.

I sure haven’t. Thanks!