Op-Ed: I’ve drifted away from the church. So when my kids asked me why people celebrate Jesus' birthday, I struggled for an answer — until the gospel of Luke showed me the way. (via latimesopinion)
For the past three weeks, every morning at around 6 a.m., my 8-year-old son bolts out of bed and races downstairs to his Advent calendar. He’s a Lego fiend, so behind each of the calendar’s 24 doors is a little bag of plastic bricks. By the time I stumble down, he’s already got the set built and has slotted it into a vaguely seasonal narrative. Usually, he’s too busy to talk, but the other morning, he asked a question I’ve been dreading for the last couple years.
I want them one day to dig into all the surprising, grisly, strange details of the story of Christ’s birth in Scripture. Though I’ve drifted away from the church, the Bible is central to my life. I’ve written a book on it and teach it in my college courses whenever I can.
So what’s a dad to do? Well, I think I came up with an answer. On a recent night, we sat down as a family and read Luke 1:46-57. In this passage, the evangelist gives us what some call the Magnificat, the song Mary sings when she learns she’s pregnant. There are lots of great reasons I’m thrilled to teach it to my kids — it’s one of the most beautiful poems in the Bible, it’s spoken by a woman of color, and it inspires all sorts of great music.
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