Our Christmas

           I hope your Christmas was spectacular.  Rosie and I went to Cleveland to see our third daughter and her kids.  This was a great trip and necessary for all of us to celebrate the love that we share with each other.  Our other kids, and our grand-kids and great-grands also celebrated with us this wonderful feast of the Incarnation.  We gave gifts and received them and had a chance to experience the joy that family brings. 

            But family isn’t only our relatives.  We gather in our churches also as family.  We are the family of God, redeemed by our Lord Jesus and called to share the love that God has provided for us with the whole world.  That isn’t an easy job.  Sometimes we feel very much alone in this, especially when we see the privation and hardship that exists is so much of this world, and in our own neighborhoods.  Every time that I turn on the television set, I see stories of shootings and crime.   Stop shooting, we love you signs are up all over the place around here.  We are well aware of the isolation and damage that exists on our own city and our own blocks.   

            So what do we do about it?  It seems to me that the people of Homewood and other places in Pittsburgh where crime seems to be rampant have done a lot.  You have established community groups to talk and to share.  You provide for those who have nothing, and do everything that you can think of to make your neighborhood safer.  I have long admired what goes on in this place to create the Kingdom of God in the middle of confusion.

            Christmas is about hope and inclusion above everything else.  Jesus was born into a time of conflict and terror.  The stories of the killing of the children by Herod the King because of his own paranoia at the news that the wise men brought him about the birth of another King of the Jews, is what set him on this path.  I have always been pleased with the warning that the wise men received from the angel in a dream to go back to their homes another way and to avoid Herod’s invitation to report to him the location of the newborn king.  God had a hand not only in the birth of our Messiah, but in the protection of Jesus in the aftermath of that birth.

            Christianity is a religion that is firmly established in mystery.  We, thankfully for preachers, don’t pretend to have a lot of answers.  We rely on the scriptures to give us the questions to ask and the hope that is offered.  I love the first eighteen verses of John’s Gospel that sets out in poetic form the coming of the Word of God into this world.  The Word that existed from the beginning of time becomes flesh and dwells among us.  This is the essence of the meaning of Christmas; the coming of God to this earth to walk in the shoes of humanity; to feel hunger, thirst, pain, joy, rejection and finally death.  This, for me, is the reason that I can worship this incredible God.  This is God who has lived my life and has known my dreams and my hurts.  This God offers me something beyond my failures; the hope of eternal life with all whom I have loved and with the certainty that there is meaning in all of the things that I see in this world and don’t quite understand.

            Jesus comes to us just as we are, not waiting for us to deserve God’s presence, but in the state that we exist.  God, through the birth of Jesus offers us the beautiful Grace of forgiveness and the promise of hope forever.  I can receive the sacrament of the presence of God with the assurance that my sins are forgiven.  What else could we possibly need?  May God bless you all in this magnificent season.