kar0ling

Enough with the innkeeper! I was still a youth the first time I heard the “poor baby Jesus, rejected before birth and born in a stable” narrative called into question. Would first-century Middle Easterners really fail to fulfill their cultural and familial obligations to host even a distant relative? Later experiences and study reinforced the suspicions about the historical accuracy of our favourite Christmas pictures. There weren’t really inns at that time in the way we think of them now, and the word used in the nativity story isn’t the same one used for a caravanserai in the Good Samaritan story, but rather the one translated as “upper room” in the Last Supper. If memory serves correctly, a Palestinian priest explained that the whole setting was quite normal: often women would move to the part of the house where the animals were stabled when it came time to give birth because it was warm and private there. But perhaps a manger scene serves a function other than education. T...

The concept of an elevator speech for the gospel is almost offensive to me. Is it not antithetical to the gospel (God with us) to lob it at a random stranger and leave? Furthermore, I wonder whether the gospel is far less a proposition to understand and believe, but rather the things we do. Even more than that, the gospel is almost a force all its own, a subtle power that quietly transforms. But I did start to think about the challenge to express the gospel in 10 words, not to accost people with and demand a response, but because if one understands something, it should be possible to explain it simply. So I lit on this: God’s self-giving love works wholeness into all aspects of being. It’s open to revision, but that’s one phrase for it at this point in time.