I got a call from Barack Obama yesterday afternoon, so I knew something was up. True, it was a robo-call, and every other Democrat in Massachusetts most likely got one. Still, it was a rare occurance, because usually nobody is interested in my vote unless it is a primary or a local election.

Here in the Bay State, where even the dogs and cats are Democrats, our votes are taken for granted. It is true that we had several moderate Republican governors before our current Democratic one, Deval Patrick, was elected. I have always thought that was because even Democrats know that there is a high rascal factor in our state politics, and a moderate Republican governor reassured us that the henhouse wasn’t entirely under the watch of the foxes.

Then last night I got a call from an old dear high school friend from New Jersey imploring me and my family to be sure to vote in Tuesday’s special election to fill the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Edward Kennedy last year.

I voted in the special Democratic primary awhile back, and had assumed that the winner, state Attorney General Martha Coakley (photo: above left), was the heir presumptive, this being Massachusetts. That was “the conventional wisdom.” But apparently too many people, perhaps including the candidate, thought this, and now it looks like her opponent, State Senator Scott Brown, has closed the gap and the polls are saying the race is too close to call.

This is a dramatic development and has Democrats in a state of high anxiety. Bill Clinton is already here campaigning for Coakley, and the President is coming tomorrow (after earlier saying he wasn’t.)

The stakes are pretty high for Democrats, not just here in the Bay State (we call it that so we don’t have to keep typing in Massachusetts, which nobody really knows how to spell.) First of all, Scott Brown is not a moderate Republican like former governors Bill Weld or Jane Swift, or even Mitt Romney, who didn’t get in touch with his conservative inner child until he ran for President.

Brown is an unabashed conservative, pro-life, anti-taxes, and, most decisively for national politics, anti-health care reform. He has vowed to vote down the current health care bill, and, if he wins, he takes away the Democrats’ 60 votes they need to pass the thing. Now the bill will be far from perfect, but it is better than nothing, and nothing would be a blow for the country and a real defeat for the Obama administration. It is possible that the failure of this bill would mean we’d go another generation with our immoral and inefficient health care system, which would be, quite literally, a shame.

A Brown win could also be interpreted as a changing of the political winds, putting the fear into some of the wavering Democrats that aren’t too excited by the health care bill anyway, and maybe encouraging other vulnerable Democrats in unsafe seats to retire.

The great irony of it all is that if Brown wins and Coakley loses, the seat of Ted Kennedy, the iconic “Lion of the Senate” will become the vote that brings down health care reform.  That would be sad.

Special elections are funny things. With nothing else on the ballot they have low turn-outs and can be swung by the zealous and the angry. Brown has channeled populist anger at the banking bailouts, and has galvanized a coalition made up of the few remaining reasonable Republican party loyalists with an assortment of Tea Partiers and other “were mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” types, all fired up by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and talk radio. It’s not pretty.

So it all depends on who turns out to vote on Tuesday. Coakley should beat Brown in Massachusetts, but then again, the New England Patriots were supposed to beat the Ravens in Foxboro last weekend in the playoffs. So stay tuned.

‘Tis the season of top ten-ten lists, so I thought I would offer one on my favorite Christmas music. I have way more Christmas music than anybody should rightfully have, and the more stuffy side of me doesn’t quite approve of a lot of it. Nonetheless for most of my adult life I have been collecting it and playing it, changing with the technologies over the years.

The first Christmas album I really knew was Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, still one of the best selling albums of all time. I knew my mom liked Bing Crosby, so one day when I was maybe ten I cajoled my father into buying it during a grocery shopping trip to the Safeway.

That was the only Christmas album my family owned, and I can still sing every song on it from memory, including the exotic ones like “Christmas in Killarney”and “Mele Kalikimaka.” And you’ve got to love the Andrew’s Sisters!

Later my own tastes evolved more to classical, and my personal first album was Handel’s Messiah, on vinyl. The version was by the Robert Shaw Chorale, and it was just selections rather than the whole work. From a lifetime of choral singing I now know every phrase of this grand piece, and Christmas is not complete without listening to the Advent and Christmas portions of it. I have two more great recordings, an early-instrument one with John Eliot Gardner on Philips, also on vinyl, and a CD with George Solti and the Chicago Symphony on the London label with Kiri te Kanawa. I love them all.

I have quite of lot of early and Reniassance Christmas music, with lots of Gabrielli horn concerti.  I have American folk Christmas albums and German Christmas albums.

J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is right up there in the pantheon, and I have a terrific vinyl version on Angel with the King’s College Choir, St Martin’s in the Fields, with Philip Ledger, conducting and a stellar lineup of soloists: Elling Ameling, Janet Baker, Robert Tear, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. That one gets a seasonal hearing, too.

A little later in my ministry I started collecting more popular seasonal music. First there was George Winston’s December for solo piano.  Then, we were given the original A Winter’s Solstice from Windham Hill by good friends, and that was the beginning of a long collection of pretty much everything Windham Hill has come out with, including the haunting Celtic Christmas series. This was also about when I started putting together atmospheric compilations to listen to while sitting by the fire.

But I enjoy choral music as well. I have the normal anglophile’s love for the sound of choristers, and this makes me nostalgic for my time in Oxford and Cambridge. So the choir of King’s College has to be on the list, although St John’s at Cambridge, and the choirs of the colleges at Christ Church, New College and Magdalen at Oxford would do just as well.

So here is my somewhat arbitrary top ten albums and top ten singles:

My Top Ten Albums (in no particular order)

• Yo Yo Ma, Songs of Joy and Peace
• Handel’s Messiah
• J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio
• Sara McLaughlin, Wintersong
• Chris Botti, December
• Emmy Lou Harris, Light of the Stable
• James Taylor at Christmas
• Diane Krall, Christmas Songs
• Choir of King’s College Cambridge, O Come all ye Faithful (This is under-volumned, sadly)
• Bing Crosby, White Christmas

Top Ten Singles (in no particular order)

• Bing Crosby, “White Christmas”
• Sara McLaughlin, “River” ( a great cover of a Joni Mitchell classic.)
• John Gorka, “I heard the Bells on Christmas Day”
• Diana Krall, “Count Your Blessings”
• James Taylor, “Some Children See Him” (an Andy Williams’ favorite from my childhood)
• Yo-Yo Ma with Alison Kraus, “The Wexford Carol”
• Turtle Island Band, “Veni Emmanuel”
• William Ackerman, “Yazala Abanbuti”
• Liz Story, “Il es ne le divin enfant/Immaculate Mary”
• George Winston, “Walking in the Air” (from the film “the Snowman” and the album Forest)

A few years ago, when my son was at Pomona College in California, I flew out there for a parents’ weekend, and one day I was driving around in the LA sprawl and spotted an enormous Christian bookstore, so I stopped and parked and went in. And I had the strangest experience there, because I am both a Christian and one of the most bookish people on earth, and yet I didn’t see a single author I recognized in the store. Not one. There were Bibles there, of course, but not the black leather-bound ones I have, but ones in denim and calico, and with names like The Soccer Mom’s Bible and The Disgruntled Teen Bible (I made that up, but it wasn’t a stretch from what I saw there.)

I wasn’t really expecting to find a lot of Karl Barth or P.T. Forsyth, but there wasn’t even any C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Philip Yancey, Tony Campolo, Eugene Peterson, or John Stott, card-carrying evangelicals all.

And it dawned on me that certain Christians live in a parallel intellectual universe to the one I live in. These were “Christian” books, and it got me to ruminating on whether the whole idea of a Christian book is a good one.

Remember the old joke that said: “Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.” Is it possible that “Christian books are to books what military music is to music?” I admit that I am a literary snob, and a theological one, too, but isn’t there some standard of aesthetics that faithfulness requires of our art and literature, even if we disagree on just what that standard is?

I once got into an argument about music in church in which I argued that Christian worship demands good music, and my interlocutor said there is no such thing as bad or good music, just personal preference. I couldn’t disagree more. And it is not like I am wedded to one kind of music. I enjoy lots of kinds of music, but it has to be good music. Likewise I like all kinds of literature, but it has to be good.

I know I will probably get hate mail for saying this, but I didn’t like the Jan Karon “Mitford Series” because it seemed too preachy and contrived. My beloved Aunt Tia (now deceased so I can say this) was always pushing these books at me because they were “so Christian.” “You’ll like them,” she said, “because they describe a clergyman and his life with his congregation.”  I guess it never occurred to her that being a pastor for thirty years I may have known all that I wanted to know about a clergyman and his congregation.  And the clergyman in these books, while charming, seemed too good to be true, which is a bad thing in art and literature which demands, above all, truthfulness.

So I wonder if there can be such a thing as a Christian writer? There are writers who are Christian, and even deal in Christian themes, but I read them because they are good writers. I am thinking of Annie Dillard, Marilyne Robinson, and John Updike, to name but a few.  And there are books that have Christian themes like John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory, although I have never heard either of the authors described as a Christian writer.  Frederick Buechner writes luminous non-fiction devotional and theological books, but his novels, like The Book of Bebb, are never preachy or contrived.

What all these writers share is that they tell a story, and you don’t feel like you are reading a religious tract. In their novels the themes of religion are woven into the fabric of life, as religion is itself in our lives; it’s not a separate thing.

For example,  I never thought of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a “Christian” novel, and yet when George Hunsinger asked our theology class to look for themes of “providence” running through the book it jumped out at me that Bronte, the parson’s daughter, was indeed spinning out a Christian theology. But what makes it worth reading is that it is so well written, just as Marilynne Robinson’s Home may have Christian themes running through it, but it is a book worth reading because it is a good book.

Good literature, like all good art, never descends to propaganda, even for a worthy cause such as Christ and his church. Let us be wary of Christian books.

I rarely step into the mucky ground of politics on this blog. For one thing, I don’t want to get hate mail and have my blog flamed. For another I am a person of generally moderate views and did most of my metaphorical bomb-throwing during my inflamed youth.

For the record I am a Democrat, but a lukewarm one, and I like it when there is some sensible opposition to my own party when they are in power, especially here in Massachusetts where Democrats are in a preponderance.

I have many fine, smart, and knowledgeable friends who are Republicans, and wouldn’t call one of them a wing nut. Well, maybe one. I read the New York Times with appreciation, but I don’t fool myself that it is particularly objective. I chuckle at the description of it as “the parish newsletter of self-satisfied liberalism.” I almost put “self-satisfied liberal” in the space next to political opinions on my Facebook Page. Instead I just put “yes.”

All this is prolegomena to what I am about to say, which is that I have never before seen an opposition party in this country ever so bent on the failure of their opponents at any cost as the Republican Party is now.  It makes me very sad.

I never liked the vitriolic Bush-bashing that I often witnessed for eight years, and never participated in it, despite my strong view that he was not good for the country or the world. Bashing G.W. Bush at a Massachusetts dinner party takes about as much courage as cheering for the Red Sox in a Kenmore Square bar. We are a nation of laws and not men, and I respect the office of President even when I dislike the incumbant.

I don’t take Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck any more seriously than I would the guy who breathes fire at the circus. They are entertainers, and the people who take their views from them are benighted. Democrats have John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who I admit are funnier and more ironic.

But I expect better from our elected officials than from our comedians. First it was Congressman Joe Wilson shouting out “liar” at the President during a speech to a joint session of Congress back in September.

Now, a few days ago, Congressman Nathan Deal, who is also a gubernatorial candidate in the Georgia Rebublican primary, announced that he is signing a letter to the White House with several of his Congressional colleagues asking for a copy of President Obama’s birth certificate. Deal also wants to take away the Fourteenth Amendment’s right for children born on American soil to be citizens.

I long for the days when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil could have a beer together.  Where is the loyal opposition, who could horse-trade and compromise and advance the good of the country. These people today really just don’t like each other, and will not work together, even if the country is harmed by it.

And the country is being harmed by it. We have numerous significant issues before us that will impact our common life and the world’s for years to come. There are honest differences of opinion between the parties as there should be. But this kind of red-meat pandering to the wing nut base erodes the commonweal.

In Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, with the country on the brink of Civil War, he said: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

The party of Lincoln today should be ashamed of itself, and quickly recover the better angels of their nature.  This country needs a responsible opposition party and soon.

The video seems to have disappeared, but you can see it here.

I like my Christian faith the same way I like my whisky: neat. So don’t water it down by explaining away the empty tomb or the virginal conception. Don’t tell me the cross is icky. Of course it is. Don’t tell me that it was just a west wind over the sea of reeds and not the mighty work of God that opened the waters for Moses and the children of Israel. Don’t tell me that the “eye of the needle” in Jesus’ parable was really the name of a narrow gate in Jerusalem that was hard to get a camel through.

Such distancing from the story reminds me of the Congregational minister in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany (who turns out to be Owen’s father) who had lost his faith, and makes me wonder if sometimes losing your faith is more blessed than having one not worth keeping.

I was in seminary when Rudolf Bultmann’s de-mythologizing project still had some juice to it, and we were trained to take texts apart so there were just pieces and parts on the table at the end of the process. I remember a little jingle about Bultmann: “Hark the herald angels sing, ‘Bultmann is the latest thing!’ At least they would if he had not, de-mythologized the lot.”

I remember telling that to the organist in my first congregation in rural Maine while we were choosing Christmas hymns to demonstrate my wit, and her eyes got wide as if I had uttered an oath in church. Because I had, so to speak. So if my theological education stripped more and more of the things of my childhood faith away from me, thirty years in the parish gave more and more of them back to me. I came to realize, as Forsyth once said, that the historical critical method is a good servant but a bad master. I believe it all now.

It was not always so. For years I served sophisticated, educated people. They read books and listened to NPR. For years whenever the devil came up in a passage I felt duty bound to say, by way of apology, “Now of course we don’t believe in a literal devil with horns and a tail,” and then one day I realized I was selling the congregation short as people of imagination as well as faith. So I stopped doing it. Let the story be told, and let the Spirit work, and let the people listen and imagine and dream. Those who have ears let them hear.

So I am perplexed by the continuing popularity of Christian apologists who water things down to make them more palatable for contemporary folks. I would rather read Dawkins and Hitchens than Borg and Spong (actually that’s not true, now that I think about it! But you know what I mean.)

At the same time I have had really exemplary Christian lay folks tell me they love these guys. A man I really admire told me in the supermarket that Borg helped him finally make sense of Christian faith (I wanted to tell him it’s not supposed to make sense, but that would have been uncharitable.) Another terrific friend told me Spong had saved his faith. There’s a testimony to the power of the Holy Spirit for you.

Another friend who shares my view on this was driving by a Lutheran Church where the sign-board said, “The resurrection is not a metaphor!” He liked that. I like that. So I told him the great story about the time Flannery O’Connor was at a dinner party with the novelist Mary McCarthy, and since O’Connor was a famous Roman Catholic the conversation turned to the eucharist, and McCarthy said something about Holy Communion being so symbolic, and Flannery O’Connor replied, “If it’s symbolic, I say the Hell with it.” No water for her.

That is the question Jason Byassee asks on his Duke blog Call and Response.  Here’s an excerpt: “The simulcast sermons are no big deal,” he said. This would be a surprise to my editors at Christian Century, whom I’d sold on a story about an innovative megachurch called Lifechurch.tv. At this multi-site campus, one preacher preaches in Oklahoma, and 26,000 members in fourteen campuses in five states (plus many more online) watch via satellite. The pastor I was talking to, Ken Behr, pastors a church in Tennessee, with the preaching pumped in from some 700 miles away.

“People often fixate on the virtual thing, but churches are used to watching the screen. Been to an NFL game lately? You watch the jumbotron.” Then here’s the part that got me: “When I finish my master’s degree I’m sure it’ll be online. I’m not moving.”

Most theological institutions I respect have stayed away from online learning. This is for good reason: Christian faith is intrinsically an embodied thing. We can learn things in a limited way online, just as we could previously via radio, television, or even written correspondence. This is why Faith & Leadership features videos, and may offer online educational opportunities down the road. They can be useful in small doses—but to become a master (whence the “M” in M.Div: magister), and therefore a teacher, of theology is too much weight for the web to bear. It’s no accident more sacramental traditions have no Lifechurch.tv—and don’t hold your breath for the Catholics to jump on board. It’s awfully hard to consecrate the host in the webosphere. I heard an Anglican faculty member at another institution having this debate say wisely, “I refuse to teach embodied theology online.”  Read more at Call and Response.

The English writer Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) is best known for her Lord Peter Whimsy mysteries, with her proto-feminist sleuth Harriet Vane. Sayers was also a scholar, poet, and translator (she translated Dante’s Commedia) She wrote a series of feminist essays entitled Are Women Human? She also wrote theology, and good theology at that. Her The Mind of The Maker, 1941, has some intriguing ideas about the Holy Trinity.

I was reminded of her lately while reading several right-minded but wrongheaded appeals to rethink the Christian story and re-imagine the Christian God to get away from all those troublesome dogmas and creeds.

Sayers would be having none of that. She once said, “The proper question to be asked of any creed is not, ‘Is it pleasant?’ but, ‘Is it true?’” She believed that the failure of Christianity is not that it has too much dogma, but that it has either neglected or watered down what it does have. She decried the sentimental Jesus of popular piety: “We cannot blink the fact that gentle Jesus, meek and mild, was so stiff in His opinions and so inflammatory in His language, that He was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbetted as a firebrand and a public danger.” “. . . We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah,” turning Jesus “into a household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”