Good morning! It’s January 6th, the 12th day of Christmas, the commemoration of the visit of the wise men.

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” …[after Herod told them to go to Bethlehem as prophesied by Micah], they went on their way. And behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. (Matthew 2.1, 2, 9 – 11, ESV)

Here’s a brief summary of what we know and don’t know:

• We don’t know there were three. The text mentions three kinds of gifts. The gifts, by the way, could have been used to fund Mary, Joseph, and Jesus’ trip to Egypt.
• We do know the wise men were NOT at the manger. Jesus is referred to as a “child,” and the place they visited him was a “house.”
• We don’t know exactly what the star was: a comet, a conjunction of planets, or some other phenomenon.
• We can presume that these “wise men” were descendants of men who were contemporaries of Daniel in Babylon. (See, for example, Daniel 2.17, 18)

So many lessons!

• Jesus was visited by shepherds (the uneducated poor) and wise men (the educated wealthy)
• We can say that…
  • The wise men at the beginning of the story were inspired (by the star) but not informed (by scripture)
  • The Jerusalem religious leaders and scholars were informed but not inspired. I wrote about this last week.
  • Finally, the wise men were informed AND inspired, and they worshiped.

I leave you with the song that nicely captures this beautiful verse – well worth the three minutes.

When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceedingly great joy. (Matthew 2.10, NKJV)

P.S. We live in Monument, Colorado, and a smaller town just to our northwest is Palmer Lake. In 1935, the town laid out the Palmer Lake Star on a small mountain as a symbol of hope in the middle of the depression. One can see it from I-25 driving north from Colorado Springs and from many other places, too. Every year it’s on from Saturday after Thanksgiving through December. 12 days ago, Christmas night, we had a glorious sunset. Loralyn Kokes posted this picture on NextDoor:

Today marks the end of four years of daily blogging: inspired by Seth Godin and Heather Holleman, I committed to publishing a blog every day beginning January 6, 2019. By my count, 1468 blogs in 1461 days. Thank YOU for reading!

My first blog in this string was about Simeon’s daily obedience, and it turns out that’s what daily blogging is. Just show up and write. (Full disclosure, I do not say that I write a blog every day; I publish a blog every day – sometimes I write ahead.)

Writing every day actually takes the pressure off. I don’t expect (and I hope you don’t either) every blog to be a masterpiece. I created the Ewellogy in January 2014, and in the five years from then until I started daily blogging, I wrote 32 blogs. On average, one blog every 8 weeks. I’m not any smarter now than I was then, but now I write 56 blogs in 8 weeks. One reason is the commitment. The other reason is that I don’t sit around waiting for the perfect idea. A friend of mine said,

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

And so I write. Sometimes from what I see in my daily Bible readings; sometimes from something going on in the culture; sometimes to challenge us on an aspect of discipleship or disciple-making. I take part of my commission from what Jesus said to the apostle John:

Write what you see in a book and send it to the…churches… (Revelation 1.11, ESV)

Just like the story of Pat Boone gives us hope that we, too, can follow Jesus in a messed-up world, another article in the Wall Street Journal reminds us that following Jesus is not such a bad idea after all. When Mary Met the Angel by Rebecca McLaughlin is too good not to share: it has it all, from the virgin birth to the resurrection. It’s long, but I commend it to you in its entirety. Here are some highlights (also long!):

The first person ever to hear that Jesus is the Son of God was a low-income teenage girl in an obscure backwater of the Roman empire. She went by the most common name for Jewish women of her time and place: She was just another Mary. But then she claimed an angel had appeared to her and told her she would give birth to the Son of God. From the perspective of both Jews and Romans in the first century A.D., her story was completely unbelievable. How has it lasted for 2,000 years?

…Mary’s story feels like a fairy tale. But angels in the Bible aren’t remotely fairylike. They’re terrifying messengers from God. Of course, if there’s no God, then angels are ruled out. But if there is a God who made the universe, it’s not irrational to think he could have made angelic creatures too.

…To first-century Jewish ears, the claim that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit of God would have been offensive and absurd. The Greek and Roman gods had been depicted spawning demigods with human mothers, but Israel’s God was nothing like these pagan deities. He was the maker of the heavens and the earth—the one whom humans could not see and live. What the angel told Mary was the kind of thing that could get you stoned for blasphemy. When Jesus as an adult claimed divine identity, he nearly suffered stoning several times.

For Romans, Mary’s claim that Jesus was both human and divine would not have sounded blasphemous per se. Not only did their gods sometimes spawn humans, but emperors could be proclaimed as gods. Divinity was like a Roman Nobel Prize for greatness. But Jesus never led an army or controlled an empire. Worse, he died the most humiliating death a Roman could imagine. The notion that he was God made flesh would have been laughable.

But after Jesus’ death, another Mary made another claim. Mary Magdalene was one of many women among Jesus’ disciples, and on the third day after witnessing his crucifixion, she went to Jesus’ tomb to tend to his body. Like Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene claimed that she had talked with angels. Then she reported that she had met with Jesus too. The first Mary said that Jesus had been supernaturally born from her womb; the second, that he had been miraculously reborn from his tomb.

The first Mary’s claim that Jesus was the everlasting ruler of the world sounds much less crazy now, when billions across the world acknowledge Jesus as their King. When Mary Magdalene first made her claim, the followers of Jesus were a tiny Jewish sect. Today they represent the largest global religion: 31% of humans say they are Christians…Far from being a white Western religion, Christianity was multiethnic from the first, and today Christians are by far the world’s most racially and culturally diverse religious group.

None of this makes Christian belief any easier for those who think that science has ruled out the possibility of such things as virgin births and resurrections. But as Princeton historian Hans Halvorson has written, the scientific revolution was started by early-modern Christians not because they wanted an alternative hypothesis to God but because they believed in a God who is both rational and free. Today, many Christian scientists who believe that Jesus was miraculously born and resurrected see these extraordinary miracles as moments when the God who wrote the laws of nature and sustains them day by day did something different.

…What about ethics? Once pregnant, Mary prophesied that God would start a moral revolution through her son—that he would raise the poor and lowly and upend the power structures of the world (Luke 1:46-55). Her statements would have seemed bizarre in the Roman Empire, where might was right. But as the historian Tom Holland has argued in his book “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World,” Jesus’ upside-down ethics has so impressed itself upon our minds that today we think universal human rights, caring for the poor, justice for the oppressed, and equality for men and women are just basic moral common sense. Mr. Holland sets us straight: “That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it…The origins of this principle [lie] not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”

…Christianity’s claim that God not only became human but modeled and commanded care for the most vulnerable, before he himself died a brutal and humiliating death, has placed the poor, sick and oppressed forever at the heart of Christian ethical concern.

…Christians believe that the Son of God was born to die, so that all who trust in him could live as sons and daughters of God—wrapped up more tightly in his love than the newborn Jesus was wrapped up by Mary in his swaddling clothes.

When Mary met the angel, she was a no-name girl from a disempowered people in a seemingly inconsequential place. Today, if you worry that you might be insignificant—unknown, unloved and unimportant in this world—perhaps this Christmas you will hear her message with fresh ears. If she was right about her son, then you are worth the birth and life and death and resurrection of the Son of God. – Rebecca McLaughlin, When Mary Met the Angel

Good stuff, written, perhaps, so that those who consider themselves intellectuals can see that the Gospel is not so far-fetched after all and that many of our values about equality and dignity for all are actually Christian. I sent the article to a friend of mine who would probably describe himself as agnostic. He thanked me and said it was “well written.” I’m praying it will be “well-read.”

Let’s go into the New Year with our heads held high, humbly believing and sharing the best news ever passed on.

But the truth is that Christ has been raised up… (1 Corinthians 15.20, MSG)

For nothing will be impossible with God. (Luke 1.37, ESV)

As we move into the New Year and continue our spiritual disciplines, including Bible reading, we can’t help but wonder if the Christian life can be lived in this culture anymore. I have good news: it can! And it’s not theory. On December 23, the Wall Street Journal published a full-page interview with commentary about Pat Boone. I commend the article in its entirety. Here are some snippets:

If you’re under 50, you may not recognize the name Pat Boone. Consider this: For most of the latter half of the 20th century, there wasn’t a person in America who didn’t know who Mr. Boone was and what he stood for. He was the All-American; the kid in the white buck shoes; the clean-cut alternative to early rock-’n’-rollers like Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry; the star of a dozen Hollywood movies, none of which contained anything resembling profanity, social subversion or a love scene. Life magazine put Mr. Boone on its cover in February 1959, dubbing him “The Million-Dollar Idol of U.S. Teen-Agers.”

…“Back then being the All-American kid was popular, and being a family guy was popular, going to church was popular, and all of that was OK,” he says during a recent interview in his memorabilia-filled office on the Sunset Strip. At 88, Mr. Boone is spry and sharp and, despite our presence in the godless wilds of La La Land, not the least bit hesitant to quote Scripture to a complete stranger: “When the wicked are in authority, sin flourishes, but the godly will live to see their downfall” (Proverbs 29:16). A well-thumbed Bible stays on his lap for the entirety of our 3½-hour conversation. “This is my 40th year to read straight through the Bible, word for word, from beginning to end.”

…Sixty years ago, when he moved his family to Los Angeles, he paid $159,000 for a house on a 1.2-acre lot at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and N. Beverly Drive. He still lives there. “I turned down $20 million for that house,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’m going to be offered more than that, I know.” But he won’t sell. That house is where he and Shirley, his wife of 65 years, raised their four daughters. It’s where Shirley died in 2019.

…From the beginning he was intent on charting his own show-business path, one that wouldn’t force him to sell his soul in exchange for success. “When we moved to California, I said consciously to Shirley, ‘We’re not going to live by Hollywood standards, we’re going to live by Tennessee standards.’ ” I might have guessed what they are, but he spells them out: “Bible-believing, churchgoing, standing for righteousness, morality—the things that people in Tennessee just take for granted and they don’t take for granted out here anymore.”

…The America of the 1950s is fading from memory. The animal spirits unleashed by the birth of rock-’n’-roll have run wild in the land for nearly 70 years. The fabric of the country has been torn and stitched back together so frequently that it’s become almost unrecognizable. Nothing now is as it was then. Except Pat Boone. He is the same guy at 88 as he was at 18: an American square. And proud of it.

God bless Pat Boone, and God bless Matthew Hennessey and the Wall Street Journal for writing and publishing an article like this.

Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God. Carry the light-giving Message into the night… (Philippians 2.15, MSG)

Wow! Welcome to 2023. Time to start our Bible reading plan for the year, and this year it’s different!

If you want to read the Bible through in one year, the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan is among the most doable: 25 readings each month, each from four different places in the Bible. It’s a lot of work, but it can be done.

For a couple of years now, we’ve used The Navigators’ 5x5x5 reading plan for the New Testament: 1 chapter/day, 5 days/week. We liked the leisurely pace so much, with time to meditate on what we were reading, that June said, “Why don’t we broaden that concept to include the Old Testament?” So we did.

June and I developed a reading plan to go through each section of the Old Testament at the rate of one chapter/day, five days/week. This year, we start at the beginning, “a very good place to start.” We have 260 reading days (5 days/week x 52 weeks), and the Pentateuch (Genesis – Deuteronomy) doesn’t have 260 chapters, so we’ve added in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John.

Join me! We called the New Testament year 1, and we did that last year, so now we have Year 2: Pentateuch. Some of this year’s blog entries will come from these readings.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1.1, ESV)

Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isaiah 43.19, ESV)

Happy New Year!

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1.1)

And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21.5, ESV)

Our theme for the past few days thinking about characters in the Christmas story has evolved to God communicates and people respond (or not):

• The Shepherds heard from angels and “went in haste.”
• The Religious Professionals heard from the wise men and the Word…and stayed home.
• Joseph heard from God in dreams and carried out every order.
• Simeon was in touch with God through the Spirit and responded.

How about two more angel stories?

Zechariah was told by an angel that his elderly wife Elizabeth would give birth to John the Baptist. How did Zechariah, a religious professional, respond?

And Zechariah said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” And the angel answered him, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.” (Luke 1.18 – 20, ESV)

Our religious professionals aren’t doing so well, are they? By contrast, Mary, a teenage girl, was visited by an angel, too. How did she respond?

And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her. (Luke 1.34 – 38, ESV)

Almost the same question as Zechariah, but not with the same attitude. And Mary responded with obedience to what she knew would be a VERY difficult task.

What will God call us to do and by what means? And how will we respond?

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. (John 14.12 – 15, ESV)

Yesterday, we saw that God led Joseph by dreams (much like the Old Testament Joseph!). Today, let’s look at Simeon, a man in touch with the Spirit:

Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the Law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.” (Luke 2.25 – 32, ESV)

I’ve written before about the Spirit working through those who attend to him. See The First Oops followed by A Word of Knowledge. My very first blog when I started daily blogging, January 6, 2019, was about Simeon’s response.

Daily guidance from God is available – sometimes spectacularly through a dream or a vision but most of the time through the still small voice of the Spirit, available to us just as it was to Simeon.

And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left. (Isaiah 30.21, ESV)

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. (Romans 8.14, ESV)

Special edition…

It’s with great sadness and tears that I announce the passing of Babo the Dog on Wednesday, December 28. He had turned 12 in September. Our daughter Melody acquired Babo when she and her family were teaching in the Dominican Republic in 2016. His name was spelled “Vevo” then in a country where “V” comes out “B” and the Spanish long-E has an English long-A sound. When they moved to China in 2018 and taking the dog was too expensive, Melody prevailed upon us to take him so he would “stay in the family.” We didn’t really want him, but, as June has said, “It didn’t take long to have us wrapped around his little paw.” We changed the spelling to “Babo” to minimize confusion, and he’s been a loving and faithful companion for 4.5 years.

He was a sweet dog, and everyone in the neighborhood who encountered us on our frequent walks loved him. He loved the car and responded with great excitement to, “Do you want to go for a ride?” He got even more excited if I said, “Do you want to go to the Post Office?” He thought that was the greatest thing. He loved me, but June was his main squeeze. Maybe because she fed him more often than I did in the early days. When she was out, he often camped by a window that offered a view of the driveway. When she returned, he would run down the stairs to the door to the garage, and if I was there to open it, he would race into the garage and run around the car wagging his stubby little tail. By contrast, he was always glad to see me, but I didn’t usually get a tail wag!

We love to go to Estes Park, but the condo that we often rented didn’t allow pets, so we started renting cabins at the YMCA of the Rockies. He loved the walks there – all those new scents! Again, if June left the cabin, he spent most of his time looking out the window for her. The “healthy” pix were made in the cabin this summer.

He’s been gradually declining since at least this summer. Normally eating everything in sight, he began to be picky about what he would eat, and he ate nothing the last week. He spent most of his last two weeks lying on the couch where I could sit with him watching football (or soccer!) and working on the computer. He used to be “a bit heavy” at 18 – 19 pounds. 8 days before his death, the vet weighed him at 15.2 pounds. Wednesday morning at the vet, he weighed 13.2 pounds, a 2-pound loss in just over a week.

Melody and family were due to arrive for a post-Christmas visit Wednesday afternoon. We prayed that he would hang on until they arrived to say goodbye. He did. The picture shows June with Melody talking with Babo while daughters Liana (back to the camera) and Shirah look on. I’ll have to say that with all that attention, he only has eyes for me. We took him to the vet shortly after. Son-in-law Cody was kind enough to go with me. I cry as I write. As our oldest son, Mark, said, “Rest in peace, Babo.”

Thanks for reading.

But ask the animals, and they will teach you… (Job 12.7, NIV)

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. (Psalm 46.1, ESV)

I can’t write a series of Christmas vignettes without a shout-out to Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father. He doesn’t get much press, and nothing he said was recorded, but he was a faithful man.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1.18 – 21, ESV)

Now when [the wise men] had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” (Matthew 2.13 – 15, ESV)

But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene. (Matthew 2.19 – 23, ESV)

Four dreams, five obedient responses:

• Don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife – he did that
• Call his name Jesus – yes he did!
• Rise and take the child and his mother to Egypt – “And he rose and took the child by night” – immediate obedience!
• Rise, take the child and his mother back to Israel – and he did
• Don’t go to Judea – so he went to Nazareth

God led Joseph by means of dreams. Tomorrow, we’ll look at another way God led a character in the Christmas story. No matter how God leads, my responsibility is to respond in obedience.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. (John 14.15, ESV)