By Justin Crisp
Since my last column, my wife, Jewelle, gave birth to our daughter, Beatrice Anne. Beatrice was born premature at 28 weeks in an emergency, which Greenwich EMS and other first responders handled heroically. My wife and Beatrice are both doing well. Beatrice is under the care of the amazing team in the NICU at Greenwich Hospital. We do not have words adequately to express our thanks for all these local superstars, but I wanted to use this opportunity to try to do so anyway. My wife and I are so grateful to them, and we feel so fortunate to live in the community they serve. We thank God for them.
One of the holiest prayers in my tradition is said for children just after their baptisms. I’ve been thinking of it a lot in these early days with Beatrice in the hospital. It is my greatest hope for her, now and future: for God to give her “the gift of joy and wonder in all his works.”
Reflecting on it, I think so many people called “Christians” seem to have missed the message that joy and wonder is what Christianity is all about. At least we have done a very bad job of telling the world that’s what we’re all about.
In the Gospel lesson read in many churches a few Sundays ago, Jesus says something pretty enigmatic having to do with salt. “Salt is good,” Jesus says, “but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves” (Mark 9:50). What is he talking about?
I think there’s a secret to really good food, and that secret is salt. I only recently realized, devouring the cookbooks of Ina Garten, that the magic of salt isn’t its own flavor. In fact, when you put too much salt in something, its flavor can be stomach-wrenching. The magic of salt is the way it brings out the flavor of everything else. Salt gives the individual flavors of a dish like Ina’s beef bourguignon definition, like when you increase the contrast on a photo on your phone. Without salt, beef bourguignon is a kind of bland, soupy something vaguely reminiscent of beef stock. With just the right amount of salt, every flavor is vivid: the savory complexity of the red wine broth, the smoke of the bacon, the sweetness of the caramelized onions, the earthiness of the mushrooms. Salt is the magic that turns a culinary cacophony into a symphony.
And that is what Jesus says Christians are supposed to be for the world.
Christians are supposed to be people who see the world in technicolor, who turn up the volume, increase the saturation, render vivid and sublime every discrete part of human life. Christians are supposed to have that kind salt in ourselves.
But just as often, I think, the church has made Christians out to be a dour, cheerless kind of folk, people who’ve made it their whole life’s mission to remind you not to stay out too late on a school night. Christian life involves moral demands, to be sure, but it is first and foremost good news, the glad proclamation that while we were still sinners and badly behaved, Christ died for us and forgave us, and that through him, the one he called “Father” adopted us as his children.
Christianity is an invitation to a party, not a study session for an exam. Christians ought to be renowned for our joy, not our severity. We ought to be the party people of the 21st century because we ought to be able to see everything in the world as it truly is: a gift from the God who made it.
I have a collection of handkerchiefs once owned by my late grandfather. These little pieces of cloth are now as close as I can physically come to my “Paw,” as we called him. They remind me of him, in the sense that they bring him to my mind. In this way, they are much more than handkerchiefs with which I can wipe my nose. They are still that, but they are also signs of Paw, little things that point to him.
The Christian experience of the whole created order ought to be something like my Paw’s handkerchiefs. Every part of life, even those parts not ordinarily considered religious or spiritual, ought to be signs of the God who made them and gave them to us. Everything from giving your kid a bath to walking your dog to going to work on Monday morning is a gift from God, and hence something to rejoice over and wonder at.
The 17th-century English priest and poet Thomas Traherne said, “You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.” It’s as though God takes you up in his arms, shows you all creation, all of life, and says to you, “All this belongs to you. I give all of this to you—not because you’ve earned it but, rather, in spite of the fact you haven’t. Just because I love you.” That’s the religion. That’s the gift of joy and wonder we pray our children will have in all God’s works.
The God revealed in Jesus Christ is literally the life of the party. Those of us who claim to follow him ought to get with the program and be so too.
The Reverend Dr. Justin E. Crisp is a husband, dad, music lover, and priest. He serves as the priest in charge of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church and lives with his wife, Jewelle, their pug, Val, and (soon!) their daughter, Beatrice, on the St. Barnabas hilltop in backcountry. He also teaches Anglican history and theology at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.
