And His Mother Kept All These Words in Her Heart

Lack of understanding separates people all over the earth.  It causes barriers between individuals, groups, and peoples.  Wherever we go, everywhere on earth we see the tangible results of these invisible hurdles.  Lack of mutual understanding can escalate so badly that people exclude each other or threaten each other’s lives.  Each of us, whether we want to or not, forms part of the collective confusion of thinking that shuts out those who have different ideas.  Before we know it, we are involved in a conflict by spouting a judgment or taking sides.

How will these separate worlds ever come together again?  How can we ever understand what the other actually wants to say when we are always kept apart from each other by walls, words, judgments, and prejudices?  Most people take the easy way: they turn away from their opponents as if they don’t exist anymore.  However, sooner or later the confrontation will begin again.

Perhaps we have to look for a different place to put the words and ideas we don’t understand—somewhere beyond our lack of understanding.  The gospel shows a way to find such a place for all we don’t understand.  When the child Jesus, after having disappeared without a trace, returned to his parents after three days, he spoke words no one understood: “Why did you look for me?  Don’t you know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Lk.2:49) The gospel has an extraordinary expression for the way His mother received these enigmatic words: “His mother kept all these words in her heart.” (Lk.2:51)

No more than this and no less than this is needed to create a space for all that we do not understand—even for the injustice that happens in the world.  Bear it with patience.  Take it into your heart.  Sooner or later life itself will give an answer to the riddle you were given.

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, January 17, 2021

Christmas Epistle

One of the paradoxes of Christianity is that the Son of God lived only once on the earth, and that he is at the same time “the Son born in eternity.”  The reality of His one-time embodiment is expressed in classical Christianity with the words Et incarnatus est.  The Word became flesh.

The reality of His timeless embodiment is expressed in the epistle of the Christmas season with the words: “Christ has chosen the earthly body.”  More is meant with this than a mortal, material body.  Since His death and resurrection, the whole earth is His body.  In a certain sense, He moved his dwelling place from heaven to the earth.  Our dying earth existence is permeated with His presence—no matter how sick, damaged, and exhausted this earth may be—in order to transform the quintessence of this existence into a new earth and a new heaven in the future.

Undoubtedly, this is for Him, even though He rose from the dead, a lasting path of suffering.  It means an uninterrupted battle with the opposing powers, “in all future cycles of time,” as the epistle expresses it.  For us humans, death is sooner or later a liberation.  As long as we are more or less healthy, and are living without too many worries, we don’t want to think of dying.  But when we grow old and weak, when we cannot expect anything from life anymore, death is our liberator—the crown on our earthly existence.

And for Christ?  His death is but the beginning of a new, unknown path of suffering, a way He has chosen Himself.  The epistle expresses this with the unusual words: “Christ has chosen the earthly body.”  Just as He once came as a human being of flesh and blood—not for the righteous, but for the sinners, the ill, the possessed—so he chooses the dying earth existence “to release man from the deceiving false light, to release man from the senses’ unworthy craving,” always, to the end of the world.

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, 1-3-2021

Second Coming – Far or Near?

In a world of estrangement, the concepts of nearness and distance are no longer unequivocal.  Is someone near because he happens to sit next to me?  Some people may live together for years and experience nothing but loneliness, as if they were miles away from each other in their estrangement.  And in reverse, people may live miles away from each other, separated by mountains and oceans, but in spite of this feel each other’s closeness in unbreakable friendship.

There is a saying that expresses the paradox of closeness and distance in the words:

The greatest closeness is: being far and feeling near,
The greatest distance is: being near and feeling far.

Between these extremes human relationships grow or starve.

Only one being on earth is simultaneously present everywhere and near to each human being separately, as if that human being were the only one He is concerned with.  His presence is as the air that envelops the earth like an invisible mantle.  The apostle Paul expressed this omnipresence with the words:” In Him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) Since his Second Coming, Christ is present every day, just as truly as the air in which we live and move and have our existence.

For each of us, and for humanity as a whole, there will come a moment in which all that surrounds and carries us will fall away, when the moment has come to go through the eye of the needle.  Then only He will be close to us and lead us to a new form of existence.  That is the reason why Paul, who was the first to see His Second Coming, could say: “Rejoice! … The Lord is near!” (Phil.4:4-5)

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, December 13, 2020

World-Calm

At the time of Advent, words are spoken at the altar that sound as an echo of the past.  It seems as if these words no longer fit in our hectic world.  What are we to make of the expression the world-calm around us?  Where can that calm still be found?

When we listen to the world around us we usually hear nothing but noise: traffic, machines, masses of people who are restlessly on their way.  And when we listen more deeply than the audible noise, we hear inwardly a world of anxiety and pain, a world that is shaking on its foundations.  Even when some people show outer self-confidence, under the surface you can sense profound insecurity.  Is that perhaps the world that Christ meant when He said: “And human beings will lose their heads for fear and expectation of what is breaking in upon the whole earth”? (Lk.21:26)

When you listen even more intensely, more deeply than anxiety, more deeply than the ground of the soul, more deeply than the abyss, you find the ground of existence—a world of infinite calm and unshakable security.  That is what in the Advent epistle is called: the working of the Father Ground of the world.

And when in a chaotic world you look higher than our restless cities that never sleep, you find at this time of the year the rays of the dimming sunlight, that change everything they touch into gold—even the most banal and unsightly things people build on earth.  And above it the unshakable firmament.

Wherever we go and stand:

Christ walks by our side,

hidden in the world-calm around us,

hidden in the ground of the soul,

waiting to be recognized,

waiting to be found,

even when we are lost.

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, November 29, 2020.

Poverty and Wealth (Rev.3:14-22)

A well-known theologian of the 20^th century once said: “God feeds us with hunger and quenches us with thirst.”  That is an eloquent and partly true saying, but this truth is usually overshadowed by another reality: we suppress our spiritual hunger with all that chains us to the earth.  And we disguise our thirst for the spirit through all that benumbs the mind.  That mixture of materialism and intoxication, of yearning for the earth and flight from the earth, is usually called prosperity.  And the more prosperous we are in this outer sense, the poorer in spirit we are likely to become.  From the point of view of the angels we are, as stated in the Book of Revelation, “…how pitiful, pathetic, and poverty-stricken … how blind and how naked.”  We have become poor as church-mice.  What do we have that we can give to the spiritual world?

And yet, this is being asked of us in the contradictory words: “Therefore I counsel you to obtain gold from me which is refined by fire, so that you may become rich again…”  How can anyone obtain gold who is poor?

Indeed, the only thing we can give to Christ is our poverty.  The only things with which we can feed Him and quench Him are our hunger and thirst.  But whoever becomes a beggar for the spirit, who ardently longs for His presence, on those can He bestow His wealth.

For He is Himself as a beggar: a human being who knocks on our door, who asks and implores us to open—to share His meal with us.

–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, November 8, 2020.