What True Love Gives

Because I have a busy schedule tomorrow, I've spent the day putting away Christmas.  I have left a set of magi on the mantle, bringing their gifts to the Baby Jesus, but that's it.  And I've been listening to the last of the Christmas music, especially my favorite, Tennessee Ernie Ford's Star Carol album, which is the sound track of my childhood Christmases.

I love Ford's rich deep baritone, and the fact that when he sang it was about the song, the music and the lyrics, not about his own virtuosity and inventiveness.  Okay, it's a little showy when he hits that E below the bottom of the base clef, but it makes me swoon, and it's an octave drop, so I forgive him.  He doesn't try to make traditional carols sound like he's performing the 10 p.m. show at the piano bar.  That's really what I ask.

That's the album on which I first heard Some Children See Him, a carol that shaped my theology of the Incarnation.  And I found that I was very sensitive this year to the theology of the carols.  I heard very distinctly the truth that Infinite Power and Infinite Love come together in Absolute Vulnerability.  I heard the reminder that Salvation comes first to those who are most often excluded -- the poor, the marginalized, the religious outsiders.  It is scandalous.  It makes no sense.  Yet there you have it.  God comes to earth as a squalling infant, born to a couple whose respectability is suspect, in a stable.  It might have been warm and dry, but it certainly wasn't hygienic or ideal.  And if you who are rich, you who are wise, you who are entitled want a piece of this Promise, you will have to leave your comfort zone and go meet him there.

It's in all the carols.  Bring a torch.  Come, all you faithful.  He has brought down the haughty.

If you want to talk about a war on Christmas, it's not about whether or not you say Happy Holidays or Season's Greetings to people who may or may not share your religious beliefs.  It's about commercials that show people using other people's children as shills to get Santa to bring them a new luxury car.  Or Santa himself driving a car that costs more than many people's homes (the Bishop of Smyrna would NOT be pleased!  And why does he need the 8 others in front of him -- can't the one car do it all?). The war on Christmas is manifested in those who believe that everyone must celebrate what THEY celebrate.  I heard several people this year say (always quite dramatically), "Thank HEAVENS we can say 'Merry Christmas' again!"

Really?

Christmas is about God entering our lives as a flesh and blood, real life human being.  And Epiphany, which begins tomorrow, is about how God revealed God's self, God's nature, God's will in that particular human being.  And if we adore the powerless baby, the power of the adult, the man Jesus of Nazareth is seen in the way he lived out the truth of his birth:  by challenging our human tendency to disregard those who can do nothing for us, our desire to strike back when we are hurt (or even to hurt before we are hurt, as in "the best defense is a good offence").  We learn that God made us in God's own image.  When we look at Jesus, we see what it means to live into that image fully.

It has everything, everything to do with seeing that divine image in each person we encounter.

I am struggling fiercely these days to remember that.  I see politicians grasping for power.  I see systems that were created to help those in need (imperfectly, perhaps, but with good intention none-the-less) being torn down and dismantled without any alternatives being proposed.  I see people who have narrowed their sense of neighborly obligation down to family, clan, and tribe, and who are content to let the rest of the world go to wrack and to ruin without any sense of obligation or regret.  And these, too, are people in whom dwells the Spirit of God.  So I will refrain from name calling and I will try not to judge them.  But I am not content to let what is so obviously wrong stand without protest or without opposition.  I'm not sure how to do it.  But I will be a voice for justice and right relationships.

God's True Love gives us the example of what full humanity looks like and how God expects us to treat each other.  Our true love for God should be nothing less than a daily attempt to share the love we've received.

Limnal Reflections

I'll be honest.  I'm worried.

Of course worry is a family tradition, a gift handed on from mother to daughter through the generations.  I've known women who don't worry and I envy them even while I don't believe they actually exist.  Surely they MUST worry, secretly, maybe even unconsciously...How can you exist in the world without worrying?

I know that worry doesn't solve anything, doesn't prevent anything.  I know all the platitudes about how it only steals joy from today, but to be quite honest, if I weren't worried, I'd be worried.  I'd be worried that I wasn't aware of everything that was "really" happening, that I was going to miss something very important and it would ruin not only my life but the lives of everyone I love, the environment, and the cause of righteousness.  Yes, I know that I don't have that much power.  But one little twig can turn the river, right?

I am worried about the next four years.  I did not vote for the president-elect and I disagree with many of his proposals.  I dislike the way he talks about people who don't support him, about people like me.  But most of all I worry about not being brave enough to speak my mind, about not standing up for the principals that I say I do believe in.

I worry about my daughter, who has a pre-existing medical condition, losing her medical coverage and not being eligible for the treatments she needs, treatments that cost several thousand dollars a month without insurance.  I worry about my son who has beautiful brown skin, who lives in an area where most people do not have brown skin and where there is a history of racial violence, and I worry about the upswing in people who feel that they have permission to vocalize and act on their own fear of people who are different.  I worry about my husband and I having planned for the next two decades of our lives based on the structures of Social Security and about what we wil do if that structure is dismantled.

It's not a great way to start out the year, marinating in anxiety.  And I would be, I will be absolutely delighted if my fears are proved to be unfounded.  I wish no one harm.

I've said it time and time again:  the core of the Gospel message is "Be not afraid." So I'm trying to open myself to love to drive out fear, worry and anxiety.  And I'm trying to figure out what that will require of me in the days and months and years ahead.  After all, one little twig can turn the river.