New life begins with birth

I do a lot of pondering about life.

Pondering is very special to me. For me it is a primary tool in my attempts to understand life. Pondering is a non-rational exercise. It falls outside of formal logic or reasoning. Logical reasoning about my ponderings misses the point.

For me, pondering is not to be confused with meditation as practiced by some of my best friends. Pondering is not prayer. It is not simply thinking about something. It is more than that.

The Christmas season begs me to ponder the meanings bound up in the stories that surround the birth of Jesus from Nazareth. These are stories that were written well after the death of Jesus. They make no sense as historical reporting. The stories in Matthew and Luke cannot be reconciled or blended. Yet these particular stories have captured the attention and consideration of billions of faithful believers.

These stories about a virgin birth, a baby born in a stable who is visited by shepherds and wise men from afar, and stars moving around in the sky are far-fetched, but somehow they leave me pondering what it is all about.

A fertilized egg does set in motion possibilities that stretch beyond the imagination. It even contains the entire past genetic history of a yet unborn child. This is something that calls for a lot of pondering.

If I were in charge of righting all the wrongs in the world, how would I go about it? Would I need a large staff with an operation that is well funded? How well-funded would it need be? I strongly suspect that there are not enough billions of dollars and not enough staff members to do the job. Possibly a large staff with lots of money could fix a few isolated situations, but the whole world? I think not.

I could think really big like Mark Zukerberg. Possibly the answer is in getting everyone connected on the Internet. If I could get everyone hooked into Facebook, understanding would increase exponentially, and a great peace would engulf the entire planet.

In my ponderings I see a fun-loving computer junkie in Chile hacking into the system and creating incredible chaos just when the information age was about to make us all brothers and sisters. Sorry, Mark, we have to deal with the geek in Barrow.

Money and a lot of staff? Information available to everyone on earth? In my ponderings, I do not arrive at a desired end. My meanderings revisit all-out war. Get rid of bad guys. There is too much carnage, and the mess is very difficult to clean up. My mind envisions a spike in employment rates, but not much beyond has been tried, and patriotic euphoria has been enjoyed, but somehow war is simply a prelude to the next war.

There are a lot of fascinating stories in the Bible. I keep going back to them. The story of Moses is a gem. He was born to a couple of nobodies and survived only by unlikely circumstances. When God got around to talking to him about taking on a special leadership role, he bolted and ran. God did not let him get away. Moses became the great leader of a band of slaves in a foreign land. He shaped them up and became their great law giver, and they at times have been a great people.

In the best of Bible tradition, when God decides to bring about change, he starts with babies born in obscurity. God does not start with a well-funded staff or a scientific genius or an army of warriors. Now that is something to ponder.

I read the Bible’s Jesus’ birth narratives and I see the similarities. When in my ponderings I put aside the angels, the shepherds, the wise men and the roaming stars, I see God working his plan. A baby born to humble people of no particular note. The baby became a teacher of poor people who were suffering under the cruelty of Roman rule. God did not start with wealth, genius or an army. God chose to start his redeeming work with the birth of a baby.

This whole birth thing is important to me for personal reasons. My grandfather was a poor hillbilly born in southeast Missouri. As a young man he became a drinker of alcoholic beverages. He would be quickly identified today as an alcoholic. Why Ida Shell married John Bess, the drinker, she really did not know. They had babies. John kept drinking. A traveling evangelist with a tent came to Marble Hill, Missouri. John Bess went to a meeting and was saved. He was re-born. He never drank again. He moved his family to Central Illinois. John and Ida raised their five kids in the church.

Births (and re-births) are about new beginnings. The birth of Moses set in motion a unique people, who have blessed the entire world. The birth of Jesus altered the history of the world. The rebirth of John Bess has blessed the world with doctors, nurses, teachers, university professors, ministers, highly successful and ethical business men, and four generations of church men and women.

And these are my ponderings at Christmas time.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.

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