A Welcome for Would-Be Wizards--January 5, 2026

A Welcome for Would-Be Wizards--January 5, 2026

"In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, magi from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, 'Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at his rising, and have come to pay him homage'." [Matthew 2:1-2]

All the wrong people come to Jesus. At least, maybe that's how it looks from one vantage point.

You could also say that when God throws a baby shower, the list of invited guests sure looks unworthy and unacceptable to the eyes of Respectable Religion... and unlikely to everybody else.

Take the travelers who come here in the story we call the Epiphany, which you might have heard this past Sunday. The visitors whom Matthew says have come "from the East," these ones he called "magi," are mysterious and slippery characters. Nobody is sure who they were or where they came from. Almost certainly they were NOT kings, despite what our hymns say, but they may well have had positions in palaces as royal advisors. The word "magi" goes back to the old Persian (modern-day Iran--yes, Iran) word for astrologers and sorcerer-priests in the Zoroastrian religion, but it's also possible that they were dignitaries from some other kingdom as well. We don't know how many of them there were (three gifts are mentioned later, but not three givers--the claims of most Christmas pageant scripts notwithstanding), and we don't know for sure how long it took them to get where they were going. They appear out of nowhere and disappear after this story, never to be mentioned again (so we have no indication that they ever came back to follow the adult Jesus or get baptized or pray to make Jesus their personal lord and savior, or anything). They have a moment in the spotlight and then vanish into thin air, like... well, like a magic act.

And beyond the long list of things we don't know about them, the little that we do know makes them all wrong for the moment. They are not Jewish--that much is certain. So they come from the "wrong" nationality. And related to that, they practice the "wrong" religion, and the Hebrew Scriptures have some pretty strict commandments against consulting the stars and planets for answers, even as a side hobby. In fact, in the eyes of the Torah's commandments, the magi would have been considered practitioners of witchcraft or augury, and they should have been stoned to death. These guys are would-be wizards, basically, (the word "Magi" is related to our word for "magic"), and despite the fact that the Law of Moses condemns all who practice sorcery or astrology as "abhorrent," "detestable," and "abominations" (all different translations of Deuteronomy 18:12, which is one of several places forbidding exactly what "Magi" do), they are welcomed. If the Law of Moses were being followed to the letter, these foreign sorcerers would have been put to death before they ever laid eyes on the promised Messiah, because they are "abhorrent" and "repulsive" according to The Rules.

And yet, as Matthew tells it, they are the invited guests of none other than Almighty God, who has arranged a sign in the sky and the stars, seemingly with the explicit intent of communicating by means of this astronomical sign to get through to pagans who practiced astrology and believed they could divine the future from the movements of the stars--something clearly forbidden by the Law of Moses and punishable by death. Let's be clear about that: despite the fact that "The Rules" labeled practitioners of astrology and magic--like the Magi--as "abominations," the Gospel wants us to hear that the living God specifically welcomed these astrologer-magicians, without first demanding that they repent of their "abominable" practices but in fact precisely through the very means of their star-reading, wizarding ways, in order to bring them to the Christ. (Remember that the next time someone tells you that "Those People" are not welcome among God's people--God seems to take such talk as a personal dare.) This is the scandal of the actual story of Jesus, rather than our various sanitized versions of Respectable Religion: the Epiphany is the story of God deliberately drawing people who would have been labeled "abominations" to encounter the promised Messiah, in spite of what The Rules said about them, and exactly through the part of their identity that got them labeled "abominable."

There's no way around it: the Magi are outsiders who are drawn to Jesus... but they stay outsiders. They are pagan foreigners, rather than devout children of Israel. And yet... there is a place for them to find the child. And yet... they are included.

By comparison, Luke's telling of the story at least has some well-deserving good faithful Israelites getting to see the child. There's Simeon and Anna in the temple, both of whom had been waiting all their lives long to get to see the promised Messiah. They had both devoted their whole lives to watching and waiting and praying for this child. And here, in Matthew's storytelling, there's a bunch of foreigners who get to cut to the front of the line and see the Messiah, too, even though they didn't know where they should be looking and they weren't followers of Israel's God. The magi are the wrong ones to get to be the first to lay eyes on the Jewish Messiah... and yet, as Matthew gives it to us, that is exactly whom God draws. "Abominable" outsiders. "Pagan" foreigners. "Abhorrent" wild-eyed wizards who believed in astrology and lucky numbers and, who knows, maybe even rabbit's feet and four-leafed clovers, too. But they are included as well. God has a way of gathering in all the "wrong" people and putting them at the top of the guest list.

And maybe that's just it.

The whole point of the Gospel, the whole point of the coming of Jesus, is how God pulls in everybody in order to bring everybody--everybody--to life. The insiders and outsiders alike. The devout and the ungodly. The "right" ones and the "wrong" ones. The folks who dub themselves "holy" and "pious" and "respectable," and the folks who get labeled as "abhorrent," "detestable," and "abominable." Without regard for worthiness or faithfulness. Everybody is drawn in close.

Even wild-eyed wizards who don't speak the language. Even you and me.

Lord Jesus, pulls us close, and use us to draw others close to you, too.

The Gospel According to Morpheus--January 2, 2026

 

The Gospel According to Morpheus--January 2, 2026

"No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known." (John 1:18)

Morpheus was right... sort of.

Maybe you remember the scene from the modern classic sci-fi blockbuster, The Matrix, (which is now more than 25 years old!) in which Laurence Fishburne's character Morpheus tells Keanu Reeves' inquiring character Thomas Anderson (soon to be Neo) tells the young hacker that the thing he's been wondering about and hearing rumors about, this nebulous thing called "the Matrix," can't be explained--it must be experienced.  "Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is," Morpheus intones. "You have to see it for yourself."

Only after the choice to be set free from the Matrix can Anderson be awakened and learn the impossible truth--in the movie, that truth is the imprisonment of humanity to artificially-intelligent machines who have reduced human beings to comatose living batteries to power their domination of the world.  If that sounds confusing to you, it may be precisely because Morpheus was right: unless you've seen this thing for yourself (like by seeing the movie), it will sound preposterous and obscure.  But once you've seen the movie, you get exactly what I'm talking about. Some things in life are like that: you can't be told about them by a secondhand description--you need a first-person direct encounter with them to really understand them.

Well, if you can hold onto that idea for a moment, you'll be in the right head-space to understand what John the Gospel writer is saying about the way any of us comes to know God.  We can't see God the way you would look at the sunrise out the window or the canned tomatoes in your pantry: you need God--the Word made flesh, the Son--to reveal God and make God known.  Now, at first, that might sound like the opposite of Morpheus' line from the movie: "No one can be told what the Matrix is--you have to see it for yourself."  But I think the movie character and the evangelist are both getting at the idea of direct personal experience to really know.  

Here's what I mean. In the movie, just hearing a few sentences of description is not enough to truly "get" what the Matrix is, and if you just get a verbal explanation, it will boggle your mind.  But if you are awakened to reality and can experience it, then you'll truly "know."  I think John intends to say something similar about God: what Jesus brings us is not a new list of factual statements about God, but the very presence of God in the flesh with us. It turns out that God is not an academic subject to be mastered like memorizing state capitals or the periodic table of elements. God is not a something, but a Someone, and that means we are drawn into relationship with God if we want to know God meaningfully.

The Christian faith, then, isn't simply a laundry list of bullet-points you have to believe and memorize; it is about being brought into relationship with the Someone who has always been there, making our existence possible, but whom we finally can know, relate to, and communicate with in our daily lives.  In that sense, John is trying to say about God in his gospel what Morpheus is saying about the Matrix in the movie: if you really want to know what God is like, you don't just memorize a catechism or work through logical proofs, but you see the way Jesus washes feet, the way he breaks bread with outcasts, the way he weeps over the death of his friend Lazarus, the way he dies on a Romans cross, and, yes, the way he appears with wounds alive again out of nowhere.  

Or maybe we could say it this way: God isn't the sort of Being whom we can pin down and dissect to make observations like a dead butterfly on display in an old museum of natural history. Neither is God an abstract concept we could deduce like a mathematical theorem using only our own intellectual powers.  God is only know-able if God chooses to be known, John says, before immediately insisting that God has indeed made that choice and decided to be revealed through Jesus, the Son.  "No one has ever seen God," he begins, reminding us that neither a telescope or a microscope can reduce the divine to an object we can grasp. "It is the only Son, himself God... who has made him known."  The word John uses here for "making known" is also the world you would use for "unfolding" something--sort of like Jesus holds within himself the infinite fullness of God, bound up within the space of his own human body and mind, and yet that in Jesus' presence, that fullness is unfurled so that we can behold God through Jesus.

That's what makes the Christian faith compelling to me. We are not here to peddle a set of pious propositions or tell me people to learn a collection of religious rules.  We are here to point people to Jesus, in whom we are all brought into the fullness of God's own presence.  Through Jesus, the unknowable becomes known.  Through Jesus, the infinite can be grasped (but not controlled) by our finite minds.  Through Jesus, we don't merely learn trivia about God--we meet God.

And we, in turn, are brought into that family of people who know God through Jesus, too.  That's what this whole faith and life are really all about.

In the end, I can't tell you who God is--I can only point you to Jesus, in whom you come to know God as a Someone rather than a something.

Lord Jesus, reveal to us the glory of God by coming among us and unfolding God's fullness for us.

God Is Not Ashamed--January 1, 2026

God Is Not Ashamed--January 1, 2026

"And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14)

God isn't embarrassed to be seen with us.

God is not ashamed of being associated with us--not you, not me, not anybody.

God doesn't need to keep us at arm's length, or to stay up in the safety of heaven, hermetically sealed off from humanity, in order to avoid being tainted by our sin or disgusted with our messiness.

Whatever it means to talk about God's glory, it doesn't require some unearthly, ethereal bubble for God to live in far away where nothing unpleasant can get in. And for that matter, whatever it means when we talk about God being "holy," it can't mean some sort of allergy to sinful humans as though God can't stand to be in the presence of crooked, selfish sinners as we so often are. God comes right into the neighborhood, so to speak. More than that, God shares our humanity completely in Jesus--all the way down to the messy physicality of flesh and bone and blood.

We have to take that seriously if we are going to consider this powerful verse from the opening poem of John's Gospel, which sets the stage for the whole story of Jesus. John makes the audacious claim, not merely that God chose to communicate with humanity, and not even that God chose to appear in a vision or a dream to some lucky saint, but that God took on the utter fleshliness of human life.

We are, after all, basically walking, talking, bags of meat.  We are made up of muscle and tissue and bone, viscera and blood and assorted pulsing organs. To be human isn't a neat and tidy experience--we are not simply minds who think lovely and tidy thoughts, but we are physical beings, with bellies that get hungry, bodies that get tired, emotions that range from fierce anger to deep sorrow to fear that makes us tremble.  And as John tells it, God is not embarrassed to be associated with all of that--to experience it, to share it, and to take all of it into God's own being.  Whatever else it means to be "God," it has to include the ability--and the willingness--to walk the dusty roads of Palestine, eating at dinner parties with the tax collectors and sinners, and weeping outside the grave of his friend Lazarus.  All of it--the whole experience of being human, from sniffling noses and tear-stained cheeks, to gnawing hunger and bleeding vulnerability, is within God's life now, through Jesus.

And like I say, this makes a big difference in the way we understand the meaning of God's "glory" and God's "holiness."  I don't know about you, but over the years, I've heard plenty of religious voices that would have us believe that God's glory primarily has to do with God being untouched and unsullied by the messiness of the material world.  We think of it as God's radiance, like a blinding light that is undimmed and unaffected by the slings and arrows of mundane life--of eating and sleeping, of sweating and washing, and all the other stuff of our ordinary human routines.  I've heard plenty of those same religious voices talk about God's holiness in similar terms--that being "holy" means that God must be distant and damning toward our sinfulness, and that a holy God cannot stand to be in the presence of sin, lest God's purity and perfection be offended.  And to me, that always makes it sound like a flaw or a weakness on God's part--like some kind of allergic reaction to getting too close to scoundrels and sinners.

But again, if we take John at his word that in Christ Jesus, "the Word became flesh and lived among us," such that we "have seen his glory," then whatever that glory is, it can't be afraid of hanging out with the likes of us.  Whatever God's "holiness" is, it can't be a limitation that keeps God from touching our broken places, washing our dirty feet, or embracing us even while we are sinners. God has chosen, not only to come close to all of our mess, but to identify with it--to share it as God's own. That's the scandalous truth of the Gospel.

As a new year begins on the calendar, there's a certain freshness we often find at the turning of the page.  A new year often feels untainted and pure--no mess-ups yet, no broken resolutions yet, no disappointments or heartbreaks since the clock struck midnight.  It is easy to tell ourselves that God can come near when a new year begins, because we are starting fresh without red-pen marks on our permanent record.  But of course, the news John tells us is that God doesn't wait to come near only when we have a clean slate or a winning record.  God has come even knowing all the unresolved baggage we are still lugging with us from last year. God has come to us in Christ, knowing full well that the selfishness and sin we struggled with last year will still trouble us this year.  God has come to us, sharing the fullness of what it is to be human, because that is how God's love works.

And that sort of love--love that is willing to share with us the pains and the disappointments and the heartaches of life in this messy, physical, walking-meat-bag existence--well, that sort of love is nothing short of holy and glorious.  Indeed, we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth--it is the way God shares our flesh.

Lord Jesus, enable us to recognize your presence among us, and to know you are unashamed to share life as one of us.

The Rejectable God--December 31, 2025

The Rejectable God--December 31, 2025

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.... The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him." (John 1:5, 10-11)

God chooses to be, for lack of a better word, rejectable.

That's one of those notions which look simple at first blush, but which turns out to be utterly mind-blowing if you give it even a moment's thought. God--whom we often subtitle with words like "Almighty" or "Omnipotent"--choose to run the risk that we, who are God's creations and constantly dependent on God for our existence, will say "No" to God's good intentions and refuse to accept God's coming near.  

If that's how an all-powerful God acts, then we either have to radically reconsider what we mean by true power, or we may want to take up with a different deity. After all, conventional wisdom thinks that being powerful means demanding that you get your own way.  When you hear people at podiums shouting about being seen as "strong" and "tough," they tend to mean steamrolling over those who stand in your way, ignoring those who disagree, or silencing those who say "No" to your agenda.  When you hear authoritarian leaders describing their regimes as "powerful" and "great," they tend to mean pushing others around, getting rid of opponents who reject them, and taking by force what they want. God, on the other hand, chooses to be strong in a different way.  God's way of being God, so to speak, knowingly comes into a world that is going to reject God.  And God does it anyway.

That's the scandal of the Christian message. And yet, you can't say that John the Gospel-writer hides it in the fine print. Here in the opening verses of his telling of the story of Jesus, John begins with this poem describing Christ as both the "light" that shines in the darkness without being snuffed out, and at the same time, as the one who "came to what was his own, and his own people rejected him."  This is the paradox: Christ is the One by whom the world was made--and yet the same world didn't recognize or receive Christ. God took the risk of becoming rejectable in Christ Jesus, and we did precisely that: we rejected him.

The fact that John tells us this from the get-go means that both John the storyteller and Jesus, the very Word of God in flesh, know that this story is headed toward a cross.  We reject Jesus all the way to the point of killing him--and in him, we are rejecting God. God, of course, knows this already, and bears the pain of it.  God knows, not just from late on Maundy Thursday, or from Christmas night, that there are nails and a crown of thorns waiting--but from before "Let there be light..." and ever since.  And yet, God chose to be rejectable all the same.  That is God's kind of power. That is God's sort of strength.

We should probably be clear about that so that we can be honest about the kind of community we belong to if we are Jesus' followers.  We aren't joining forces with the biggest bully on the block in the hopes of getting the spoils when he pushes other people around.  We are disciples of the One who knew the world would reject him--and loved the world anyway.  We are children of the God who doesn't force, threaten, or intimidate the world into accepting God's presence or plans, but rather bears our defiance and temper tantrums with patient strength.  That's the family to which we belong. That's how we are called to love, too.

Once we hear John's opening description of what happens in Jesus' coming, we can't be the same anymore. And we can no longer be comfortable with the old strategies of bullies and authoritarians who impose their whims on others.  That is simply not compatible with the way of Jesus--which, as John keeps insisting, is the way of God.

Today, how might we be called to wield the power, not of cajoling or forcing others to do what we want, but to risk rejection and love anyway?

That, it turns out, is just the kind of love the world needs--even if it doesn't know it.

Lord Jesus, keep us from rejecting you any longer, and make us to love with your kind of enduring strength.

Every Face Divine--December 30, 2025

Every Face Divine--December 30, 2025

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being was life, and the life was the light of all people." [John 1:1-4]

We are going to have to come to terms with two things: first, that Christ (here called "the Word" by the evangelist John in a particularly poetic mood) is somehow one with God; and second, that Christ (the same Christ who is one with God) is also present in and through all of creation.

And that sure sounds like John is saying that the whole world--indeed the whole universe, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here--is steeped in the very presence of God and put together in the power of Christ. The whole world. All of it. Every nook and cranny. Every dark corner, deep sea trench, and dusty coal mine. Every sun-baked desert, tropical rainforest, and melting glacier. And every human heart, too.  It's all holy ground, just as every person is made in the image of God, and every face divine.

Both ideas--the idea of a human being (Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ and the Word) being somehow one with the Almighty and Eternal God, and then the idea that this Christ is somehow present to all of creation, in all of its messiness--are mind-boggling and scandalous. We could spend hundreds upon hundreds of pages probing at those mysteries--and in fact, Christians have spend an awful lot of time and paper and thought on the first of them. Indeed, what we have distilled for us into the handful of paragraphs we call the Creed was the product of a lot of arguing, thinking, praying, and the occasional slap from Saint Nicolas himself (true story!), all of it over the mystery of how Christ can be one with God and yet also distinct. Christians have been talking about that mystery with the convenient shorthand, "The Doctrine of the Trinity," for a long, long time now, and at least in the tradition I come from, we recite a summary of that doctrine every Sunday as part of our weekly worship. So even if we still don't quite understand it all, at least a good number of Christians have spent a good bit of time ruminating on the idea that Jesus Christ is one with God.

That doesn't mean we don't need to talk about it anymore, but it does mean that that particular mystery has gotten a lot of press over the years.

But the other, the perhaps less-considered mystery, still calls out for our attention and consideration. John the Gospel-writer also makes the claim that Christ touches every point of creation--that there is nothing in all the universe that doesn't bear his fingerprint, so to speak. And that does something very powerful to our view of the world, if we dare to let the idea seep into us. It means that, in a very real sense, it's all holy ground. Everywhere you step, you are both in the presence of God and in the handiwork of God. There is no place you can go where God isn't, and there is no face you can meet which is not made in the image of God. And because, as John the Gospel writer goes to great lengths to point out, Christ Jesus (the Word) is one with the living God, then there is no human being, anywhere, who does not bear the stamp of God's craftsmanship or the family resemblance to Christ somewhere.

That means Respectable Religious people bear the image of God... and so does the hot mess who has never darkened the doorway of a church but has walked in and out the door of rehab plenty of times without ever quite giving up their addiction. It means that the bald man who was your childhood neighbor is made in the image of Christ... and so is the woman who wears a head scarf, came here from across an ocean or two, and doesn't believe the same things you do about Jesus. It means that your town, your state, and your country are masterpieces of God... and so are the lands to the south, north, east, and west. It is all, irrefutably and inescapably, the creation of the God who made all things through Christ the Word. So whether a person or a place meets with my personal approval or not, they are already a creation of a God who takes ownership for all of it, the whole shootin' match we call the universe.

That doesn't mean we are all perfect peaches--just the opposite, actually. But despite the fact that every one of us is a hot mess in some way or another, and despite the fact that all of us constantly fail to live up to the fullness of love and creativity that God intends for us, God doesn't disavow making us or disconnect us from Christ who is the source of our life. Our very existence is evidence Christ hasn't given up on us, and in fact, longs for us to see that we bear the image of God.

For that matter, even though we collectively do a rotten job of taking care of the world that God has entrusted to us, it doesn't stop being God's creation. That's actually a pretty big idea to consider, because it means that even though God is apparently willing to risk that we will wreck the place, God still loves and claims ownership of this world, this life, and this day. The Scriptures do not give us permission to shrug and say, "This is our world to do with as we please," and then in the same breath say, "and God will just stop the wildfires we set or make some more turtles to replace the ones we've killed." No, in fact, God bears all the terrible things we do the world in which we have been placed--and the people who live in it--and still God claims ownership over the world, even while we are wrecking the place. When we do wreck things, though, we should be honest--we are wrecking a world made by God, through Christ, filled with the Spirit. We should be clear: the world we either care for or wreck, is holy ground, through and through.

Every face bears a family resemblance to Christ's face.

Every place bears the telltale scorch marks of the presence of divine fire like Moses taking off his shoes before the burning bush from which God spoke.

The Bible itself tells us so--so to take God's Word seriously is also to take God's world seriously.

Now, go step out into the world that is steeped in the presence of Christ--and live in it today, among other people today, like that is true.

Lord Jesus, reveal your face to us in the world around us, and in the faces you send across our path today.

God Enters Into the Story--December 29, 2025

God Enters Into the Story--December 29, 2025

"But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children." [Gal. 4:4-5]

Terrible things happen in the world sometimes.

God is not caught off guard by them.

Both of these are true, as hard as it is to hold them together.

In fact, both together are what the child in the manger is all about. And without them, we run the risk of sentimentalizing Christmas into mush.

We cannot simply cover over the evil in our world with a slogan announcing that "God loves us" and ignore the fact that so often we feel as though our world has been abandoned. And we cannot chirp back easy defenses for God to resolve the tension that comes from believing in a God who is both good and almighty in a world where goodness sometimes seems so utterly impotent. (The book of Job will teach us that, too--Job's friends all offer explanations and defenses for God in the face of evil, and in the end God seems to affirm Job's angry questioning of the silent heavens. So let us not pretend that the Bible forbids us from bringing the hard questions right in God's face.) So, determined to be utterly honest about the tragedies of our world and our lives, we still come to this Word from Galatians looking for God to speak good news--and not just generically nice news, but genuinely good news that can meet us in this moment and this situation.

Paul here sketches out God's way of dealing with the ever-present tragedy in our world, and it has two edges to it. First, God's way of engaging the evil of the world (evil which is made all the more palpable because the Law points it out to us) is to come into the world among us--"when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son." It has been the claim of Christians from the beginning that this Son is no less than God, too, so God's way of dealing with evil is not simply to wave a wand from outside the evil, Deus ex machina style, nor is it to simply send a heavenly employee to represent God in the world. None other than God-in-the-flesh enters into the same world in which we live and suffer and weep with those who weep. We may become impatient as we wait for the "fullness of time," but the Christian story hinges on a God who enters into the story, into the world, into the face of evil--not just in Jesus (although most definitively in Jesus), but all along.

Now at the same time, the Christian story insists that God meets us in the pit, so to speak, in order to do something. Jesus comes as one "born of a woman, born under the law" in order to redeem those who are under the power and curse of the law--that is, all of us--in order to make us children of God. This is an important point--God doesn't just impotently sit with us crying in the pit, sorry that nothing more can be done. (Sometimes, it is all we can do, as believers in community, to sit with someone who is suffering and weep with them, and that is perhaps enough for us to do. But God has more in mind.) The story of the Christian faith announces that God is not afraid of being in the pit with us, but that God is then determined to bring this world out of the pit, to heal it, not just to weep over its sickness. The God of our story is more than a big gooey ball of feeling. Our story is of a God who acts, who really and truly acts in history, and in our presents. Paul dares to say that the central point at which God's suffering and God's acting meet to heal this whole world is in the human flesh of Jesus. But Paul yet affirms that this God is still suffering and acting in and with and under this world.

And so we will call on the living God to do both for us--perhaps it seem audacious to call on God both to act and to suffer, but it seems that it is precisely what God would have us do.

Lord Jesus, We give this day into your hands because it is all we know to do. We trust that they will be strong enough to bear us up and carry us through present trouble, even as we know they still bear the scars of weakness and of troubles past, taken on for us. Hold us, and all who grieve this day, always close in your strong embrace, with those same arms ever outstretched to us in love. We pray to be held there, even in the life-worn arms of those people through whom you love us, too. We ask it, Lord, in your own strong-and-weak name.

God's Peace-Bringing Presence--December 25, 2025

God's Peace-Bringing Presence--December 25, 2025

"In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger'.” [Luke 2:8-12]

If you are in a burning building and a firefighter runs into the flames, picks you up, and carries you to safety without speaking a word, it would be enough. Saving your life is the critical thing, and that doesn't require an explanation. But if the firefighter sees that you are scared and says to you calmly, "I'm here to help. It's going to be ok. You can trust me," and then carries or leads you to safety, there is an added gentleness that makes a difference somehow.

The outcome might look the same--either way, the person in the burning building gets out to safety. But the additional attention it takes to practice kindness certainly makes it easier to go through the scary experience. Going into a burning building demands bravery from the firefighter no matter what, but when the firefighter takes the time and energy to put the one being rescued at ease, it helps them to be brave as well. And it reveals that the rescuer cares enough to think about how the one being rescued feels. That might seem unnecessary or additional, but it sure does feel important if you're the one petrified by fear in the flames. It means a great deal if you are the frightened one to have someone tell you, "You don't have to be afraid. It'll be all right."

The same thing could be said about a good nurse or a doctor with old-fashioned "bedside manner" in the Emergency Department: they can give you medicine or perform surgery without being compassionate and still save your life, but it makes a world of difference to bringing you peace if they can do it while assuring you, "You are going to get through this. You are in good hands." Someone can save your life without caring for your troubled spirit, I suppose, but there is something genuinely beautiful about those times when the ones who come to the rescue also care about being tender with our hearts.

That's something I've found myself picking up on in the story of Jesus' birth lately. God doesn't simply save the world--God takes the additional time to tell the world, "I'm here to help. You can trust me." God doesn't just send a savior in secret, as Luke tells it, but goes to the trouble of finding other ordinary people who are struggling, as the old carol puts it, "beneath life's crushing load," and takes the time and effort to stop and say, "You don't have to be afraid." For us who know this story by heart from decades' worth of Christmas pageants and Charlie Brown specials, it can be easy to gloss over this detail. But consider for a moment that God didn't "have" to announce anything to anybody, even if God were determined to send a Savior. The child could have been born in total anonymity, without anybody aware of anything, just as the firefighter could step into the burning building and never do a thing to put the ones who are trapped at ease before rescuing them. It would still "count." Their lives would still be saved. But God knows that while the saving is happening, it does something to ease our fears to be assured that we are not alone--to know that God is at work even when we cannot see how we'll get out of the mess we're in.

It's worth taking this moment to see and understand this dimension of God's love--that God is willing to take the extra step, to go to the extra length, and to make the additional effort, to be kind to us even in the act of saving us. God loves us, and that love is not merely a duty-bound, no-nonsense piece of business, but comes with the kindness of making sure our fears are put at ease. God takes the time to tell a bunch of shepherds what is happening in town, and that they do not need to be afraid. God is not merely saving the world in Jesus--God takes the time to calm our fears in the act of saving us. God is like the gentle firefighter who knows how to reassure the people being rescued while they are being pulled out of the flames, or the empathetic nurse who assuages your fears while giving you the medicine you need.  Ultimately, this is how the peaceable kingdom we've been hoping for comes: by God's Word spoken tenderly to our fearful hearts until it finally gets through to us and our spirits unclench to let God's love in.

What difference does that make? Why is it better that God sends angels to tell a handful of unimpressive anybodies that there is good news for all people? Well, in a sense, it's the very fact that it's unnecessary that makes it noteworthy--God could save in secrecy and silence, but God knows our needs enough to tell us, "This is what's happening now. I want you to know so that you won't be afraid, and so you'll know you can trust me." God doesn't "have" to do it that way... but God chooses to. That's how God's love works--there is a kindness there that goes beyond a job description or a matter-of-factly assertion, "I'm just doing my job." God's love is kind--and that is such a beautiful gift.

Today, just let that sink in. God loves you, and me, and the likes of anonymous sheep farmers, enough not merely to send a savior, but to make sure we know we don't have to be afraid while that savior is going to work. God is willing to take the time and make the effort to put these fearful hearts at rest. Maybe our love, too, can begin to learn to take the time with other people as well, so that they'll get a glimpse not just of God's saving power, but of God's peace-bringing presence.

Lord God, thank you for the time and attention you spend to put us at ease in the act of saving this world.