“Come all ye faithful, and all ye who would like to be faithful if only you could, all ye who walk in darkness and hunger for light…Come and behold him, born the king of angels. Speak to him or be silent before him. In whatever way seems right to you and at whatever time, come to him with your empty hands. The great promise is that to come to him who was born at Bethlehem is to find coming to birth within ourselves something stronger and braver, gladder and kinder and holier, than ever we knew before or than ever we could have known without him.” - Frederick Buechner

Text: Luke 2:1-20

One of the lessons you learn very quickly as a parent is that the birth of a child isn’t the end of the work. In fact, it’s only the beginning.

The same is true of Advent and Christmas.

Christmas isn’t a conclusion, but a new chapter in an unfolding story that we are still living out today. As we revisit these familiar stories each year we are not only watching the characters in the story as they play their part, but we are also trying to find our role in the story. How are we being invited to continue the spirit and work of this story in new and fresh ways today?

Let’s conclude our time by listening to the words of a poem by theologian and civil rights activist Howard Thurman that beautifully sums up this idea. The poem is called The Work of Christmas, and I hope it might be a reminder of the task that is in front of us after this season is over.

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.

Reflection:
How will you participate in the continued work of Christmas after this season is over?

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“Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not.” -St. Augustine
Text: Romans 5:18-19

Happy Christmas Eve, friends!

Many of us have been taught that the goal of the Christian faith is to help us overcome—to save us from—our humanity. After all, isn’t that our problem? We even use our humanity as an explanation for the moments we fall short, don’t we? When we mess up, we often say, “I’m only human,” and we all know what it means: Don’t expect too much. Put the bar low, and we humans will find a way to slither under it. The picture painted in our Scriptures couldn’t be farther from that understanding.

The story of the Bible begins with God making humans to bear Their image to the rest of creation. We are a combination of soil and spirit, and God called that mingling of earth and divinity “good.” Nothing has ever changed that. The truth is, in our worst and weakest moments it is not our humanity that is the problem. Our biggest challenge is that we, far too often, live beneath our good humanity. When we live together in subhuman ways we end up with the violence, greed, and bigotry that have so marred God’s good world. To put it succinctly, being human is so good that God joined in on the party. That is part of the meaning of the Incarnation, and it didn’t just begin with Jesus. God has always partnered and collaborated with humans to move creation forward. Yes, we are the source of our problems, but we are also the source of the solutions to our problems.

That is essentially the argument Paul is making in Romans 5. He argues that through Adam, a human, sin and death entered the story, but it is also through a human, Jesus, that sin and death are defeated.¹ We have big human-created challenges, and God has decided that we will also be the remedy to those challenges.

Advent calls us to that responsibility, to taking seriously our role in the healing and repair of creation. May we embrace this invitation, this calling, to join God and one another in the work of bringing much needed justice and renewal to creation.

Reflection:
How does the idea that we are the human solution to our human problems strike you?
What does it mean for our understanding of the Jesus story?
What does it mean for our understanding of the human story?

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The Risk of Birth by Madeleine L’Engle
This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late.
That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honor & truth were trampled to scorn—
Yet here did the Savior make His home.
When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn—
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.

Text: Galatians 4:4-5

Paul is the first written witness we have to the life of Jesus. That is a fact that often surprises many readers of Scripture. The assumption is that, since the Gospels are first in the order of the New Testament and they also narrate some of the events/sayings/actions of Jesus, the four Gospels must have been written first. That is not the reality of our sources. Mark was the first Gospel to be written, sometime around the year 70 CE, or roughly four decades after the life of Jesus. Paul wrote his authentic letters that we have between the late 40s and early 60s CE, or roughly twenty to thirty years after Jesus’s life.

I bring all this up because our earliest source, Paul, doesn’t seem to focus on the birth of Jesus as a miraculous event, like the Gospels of Matthew and Luke several decades later. Instead, Paul says only a few things about Jesus’s origins:

1. Jesus was born of a woman. (Galatians 4:4)

2. Jesus was born under the Law (Galatians 4:4)

3. Jesus was a descendant of David (Romans 1:3)

Nothing spectacular, really. If you boil it down, the totality of Paul’s claims about Jesus’s birth are that he was born like all humans are born, that he was Jewish, and that he descended from David’s family tree.

These are the earliest claims about Jesus’s origins…and I absolutely love it!

Jesus was not a superman invading earth from somewhere else, on a mission from God.

Jesus was one of us—human like us, born like us.

That means what he did, what he taught, and how he lived are not beyond our reach. The vision of the world that energized his work can also energize ours. The love that he embodied is also the same love we can embody.

If it means anything, the Incarnation means that God can best be known and experienced in the flesh, blood, bone, joy, grief, hope, and possibility of humanity. We truly bear God’s image.

The earliest “Christmas” message seems to have been that Jesus was one of us, and that we can be like him. Now that, my friends, is some good news!

Reflection:
If our earliest witness (Paul) emphasized Jesus’s shared humanity more than his miraculous origins, how does that reshape what it means to follow him—not just believe in him?

Where in your own flesh-and-blood life (your work, relationships, limits, griefs, or hopes) might God be known and experienced right now?

What changes if the “good news” of the Incarnation is less about Jesus being unlike us and more about how deeply he was connected to us and our experience?

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“If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling love, actually … is all around.”
- Hugh Grant, Love Actually

We are now in the final days of Advent, and the theme we reflect on as we approach Christmas is love. As we begin this week I can’t help but think about a photo I took several years ago. It was around Christmas, and I was leaving a store in a mad rush when I happened to look down. At the spot where the concrete store entrance met the pavement of the parking lot, I saw a pothole, but it looked as if someone had created this divot almost intentionally.

The mini-crater was in the shape of a heart.

Since it was the appropriate season, I immediately thought about the opening monologue of one of my annual must-watch Christmas movies, Love Actually. This voiceover, with scenes of airport reunions playing on screen, is done in-character by Hugh Grant, who played the British Prime Minister, David:

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling love, actually … is all around.”

He’s got a point. While hate and greed, and all sorts of other unfortunate things, seem to exist in abundance these days, I really believe that love does, too. Perhaps it goes unnoticed at times, lost in the cacophony of hatefulness that gets most of the attention, but love is, actually, all around us.

My hope for all of us, in this season and beyond, is that we can become attuned to the love that is all around us, all the time, and do our part to make it grow and flourish.

Reflection:
Where have you noticed love unexpectedly or surprisingly?
How can you participate in making love more visible?

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