May You Find a Light

May You Find a Light

Chris Cox

I cuss very sparingly. Not for moral reasons though it did start out that way. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I have spent so much of my career working around young people. Of course, some young people love it when an authority figure cusses, but I want to be respectful that different families approach profanity in different ways. Plus it is fun to play with language and exclaim “biscuits” like Bandit or “horse hockey” like the 4077’s Colonel Potter. Ultimately, I greatly value language. If you are just carelessly using cuss words all the time, or any words for that matter, they start to lose their meaning.

All of which is a prelude to saying that 2023 was a s*** year for our family.

Not that it was all bad. I got to fulfill a lifelong desire and stayed at a monastery for a weekend and it was a profoundly meaningful experience. We finally got to take our boys to Disney World and we ended up starting a podcast to talk about those memories. Furman finally made the NCAA Tournament and dramatically upset a #4 seed in the first round. We got to go on an Amtrak adventure and visit Canada. EA had a quilt go viral on Instagram. I got to laugh around tables with family and some friends.

The Perilous Pursuit of Peace

Chris Cox

There is no peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

When we’re hurt, we have to decide to make our lives bigger than the pain we were caused….But it’s a choice we’ll have to make over and over. We’ll have to scream it, cry it, whisper it, say it boldly. And when we have said it enough times to enough people who love us it will get easier - Jason VanRuler, Get Past Your Past

We’ve got a few hours left in this second week of Advent in which our watchword is peace. Given what is happening in the Middle East, it is a difficult notion to talk about with any sort of confidence. And honestly it feels wrong to make special exception for this year because peace is always an elusive quality around the holidays. There are always wars within the nations and within our hearts.

Part of what makes this all difficult is that we typically think of peace as one side of a binary. On one end there is war or conflict and on the other there is peace. Thus anytime there is any sort of struggle, our instinct is to think that peace has left the building. Even the pop Christianity can unwittingly play into this idea. I cannot tell you how many t-shirts or bumper stickers that I have seen with the slogan “Know Jesus, Know Peace; No Jesus, No Peace.” The idea is that peace is something that you possess or you don’t.

The Edges of What We Can Hope For

Chris Cox

I spent most of this First Sunday of Advent traveling back home after spending about 30 hours in South Carolina to hang out with my family/watch our collective alma mater punch their ticket to the Division 1 FCS Quarterfinals for the first time in nearly two decades. The trip was more than worth it despite the travel and little sleep. Yet I felt bad that I was missing church on this first day of what is probably my favorite liturgical season. So I tried to church as best I could solo, which is most certainly not the optimal way to church. Yet sometimes one has to make do with podcasts and journaling at taco joints on the road.

As I nibbled on the complimentary, shockingly tasty friend chick peas and waited for my tacos, I scribbled a little in my journal about hope. Advent exists in this weird, timey-wimey place of anticipating the several millennia-old birth of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas and the event of Christ making everything right that is arriving and has yet to arrive. Advent is a season in limbo so the Church has traditionally decided that hope is a good place to start.

The stories that have most resonated with me over the years are one in which hope is a foregrounded theme. The shield that Superman wears on his suit is the Kryptonian symbol for hope.My favorite movie series is Star Wars, which famously began with an episode entitled A New Hope* and the series constantly highlights the value of staunch hope in the face of adversity. I’m reminded of how even in my favorite modern installments of the series—The Last Jedi and Rogue One—we witness characters wrestling with what to do when circumstances, the powerful, and their own haunted past cause them to lose hope.

The Sounds of Saints

Chris Cox
Weekly Lectionary

This first dark evening, EA and I drove back to church for All Saints Choral Evensong. St. B’s had been hyping this service for some time. And by hyping, I mean Episcopalian hyping which is basically just letting us know that it was going to be a beautiful and meaningful service. It was indeed both of those things.

I don’t want to be reductive but All Saints Day is a day of heartache and hope. We remember those who have gone before us. Many churches remember those who had passed on in the previous year. It is also a day where we look forward to the time when everything will be made right and we all will be saints in the presence of God.

Within this gorgeous service of music, meditation, and readings of scripture, we took part in a liturgy that I had never experienced before. Everyone was invited to come to the altar rail to light a candle in remembrance of the departed. Then all along the front were chimes of different notes. Each person was invited to ring a chime in remembrance of someone who was no longer here with us. Each ring was for another person. Some would kneel at the front and ring their chime three or four or five times.

I can only describe for you what it was like for 10 or 15 minutes to hear all of these notes ringing out. As they echoed through the sanctuary, you realize that each note is representative of a life. Not just of a life, but also love that perseveres despite time and distance and a stubborn hope that death is not the end of all this. It was good and holy and also heartbreaking. Yet it is the kind of cathartic heartbreak that we need but all too rarely allow in our lives.

The Priesthood of All

Chris Cox

I have a weird relationship with ordination. On one hand, I was ordained into the ministry seven years ago and it was one of the most meaningful days of my life. It was a moment where a calling, passion, and years of work came into bloom. I truly hope to find my way to a place where I can serve in a church again because there is so much that I love about it.

On the other hand, I have this very stubborn, very Baptist conviction that every Christian is a minister and that creating a separate class of “professional ministers” is antithetical to what Jesus taught. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that anyone who walks off the street should start running a church. The education and testing that occurs in seminary, ordination councils, and ongoing accountability are critical to the health of a minister and the communities they lead.

Yet the idea when you go into a church that one person is a minister and one person isn’t creates what I believe is a false dichotomy that one person’s vocation is sacred while the other person’s is not. For me to serve as a youth minister is no more “holy” than another person serving as a teacher, accountant, nurse, caregiver, artist, or whatever else. We often refer to it as the Priesthood of All Believers. If you are trying to follow Jesus and want to see me get animated quickly, tell me you are not a minister. Every interaction that we have with others in this world has the potential to give the ministry of love, grace, joy, light to the world around us.

It All Hangs on This

Chris Cox
Weekly Lectionary

Since early September, our youngest son and I have been doing weekly “Dinner, Discipleship, & Dad” meetings or “D&D&D” for short (last week, we added another “D” when we had deep dish pizza). Liam is wanting to take the next step in his faith by getting baptized. At our old church he would have been getting ready for a confirmation class of sorts. Though we are attending another church, he doesn’t really feel comfortable there yet. So we’re pressing forward with our one on one confirmation class, which sometimes feels like I am going rogue yet I take some solace in that I am ordained and seminary-trained.

It’s one of my favorite times of the week. Part of it comes from the fact that any time you get to have one-on-one time with your kid, it’s special. We have dinner. We talk a little about school and then we talk about forgiveness or the life of Jesus. We pray. Nerd and former youth minister that I am, I make up colorful worksheets about whatever we are talking about that night.

As awesome as it is, I feel a certain weight to talking with my kid about faith. On one hand, I know that God is bigger than whatever shortcomings that I have. On the other hand, I want to give him a good foundation with which he can grow.

This verse is where I started. Truth be told, it was the version in Mark because I like how the “Hear O Israel” part connects to the Shema in Deuteronomy. But it was the Greatest Commandment. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. Is it obvious? Yes, but we are not trying to be clever or cunning here. In fact, one of the things I love about the Greatest Commandment in Matthew is Jesus’ assertion that all of the Law and the prophets hang out these two things.

Water Like Thunder

Water Like Thunder

Chris Cox

There is a ferocity to Niagara Falls that surprised me a bit. You always know where the falls are even when you can’t see them because there is a constant pillar of mist hovering above it. The sound it makes is a roar. When the 1901 Pan-American Exposition was held in Buffalo, a hydroelectric plant funneled the power of the falls to light up the city.

Cave of the Winds is where we got most up close and personal with Niagara’s might. As our tour guide Dan told us at the beginning of the day, it’s not an actual cave. It used to be one, but they dynamited a dangerous overhang in the 1950s. Now it is a series of decks at the base of Bridal Veil Falls (which along with the American and Horseshoe make up Niagara).

Visitors get a chance to stand beneath and witness 60,000 gallons of water per second crashing down. There are a series of decks that allow you to get closer and closer if one wishes until you reach the Hurricane Deck where winds can reach up to near 70 mph. Our youngest fought the wind to stand closest to railing next to the falls. In that corner, you are doused by frigid water. I went in face first, but quickly had to turn my back because the water stung too much.

I know all of that may sound awful, but it wasn’t. It was actually amazing.

All Things Go, All Things Grow

All Things Go, All Things Grow

Chris Cox

One of my favorite things in the world to do is to travel to new places. I love driving roads I have never driven before. I love seeing new sights even if they are completely ordinary. I love remembering that the world is bigger that wherever I spend most of my days.

There are so many times that I have experienced new locations as a sacred place. God grabs my attention a little bit better because I am thrown out of routine. Getting out of your comfort zone has a knack for opening your eyes and recreating you.

It is Fall Break and today our family started the first leg of a journey to some brand new places. Before we head out into our personal frontier, our first destination was a city that all of us have been to before: Chicago. EA and I spent a Spring Break there many years ago and then we brought the boys along for another Spring Break that was cut short when the world began shutting down for Covid.

The Middle

Chris Cox
Weekly Lectionary

Today has been a good day in spite of also being a very heavy day, which means there is not much in the tank for Ye Olde Weekly Lectionary. So I simply have two thoughts that Rev. Sides shared this morning and the inevitable weird pop cultural direction my mind immediately went with one of those thoughts.

The passage today is about the people quarreling with Moses because there wasn’t water after last week the people quarreled with Moses because there wasn’t enough food. And this is kind of the carousel of regress that keeps the people wandering in the wilderness for forty years. It is very easy for us—centuries later and very comfortably removed from the narrative—to shake our heads. But that’s not exactly fair.

Rev. Sides shared an insight from a seminary professor that God will let people wander in the desert for forty years just so they can get their heads on straight. The sermon looked at this story from a perspective that I had not really thought about before: the fact that some of God’s best work takes time. Experiencing freedom and grace takes time. Growing into who God wants us to be takes time.

The Beautiful Letdown

The Beautiful Letdown

Chris Cox

Last night, EA and I saw Switchfoot perform the entirety of The Beautiful Letdown in celebration of the album’s 20th anniversary. It was one of the best concert experiences of my life. Those songs came out right in the middle of our sophomore year of college and it was one of those albums that is inextricably tied up with a specific time. It was special to be in the room singing along with a sold-out Ryman Auditorium to every lyric of an album that meant so much to us when our relationship was beginning.

There was a simultaneous healing and ache as we soaked in those songs twenty years on. Lyrics like “This is your life / Are you who you want to be?” hit different for a 40 year old who has seen some crap versus a wide-eyed idealistic 20 year old. There is a certain cynicism that can sand down the hope of a song like that if you’re not careful. I remember sitting on a dormitory balcony with EA and earnestly talking about who we are and who we want to be. The songs were an invitation into what he hoped would be a better world. When Jon Foreman sings “I want to see miracles / to see the world change,” we were right there wholeheartedly.

Singing those songs last night made me miss the kid I used to be a lot.

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