Snow Epiphany: Starry, Starry Night

Isaiah 60:1-6   John 1: 4-13
Matthew 2:7-12

Is there any image more compelling than a fresh white, sparkling snow on a moonlit, star-filled night? It is hard to imagine finding an image more beautiful.



What is it about the white snow and the stars and the moon blanketing the night sky that draws us in? It is impossible to say why images like this make our hearts feel warm, but they always do.

It is not unlike the images we might also conjure up about the Epiphany story... the three wise men heading toward Bethlehem following the light of a distant, but brightly-shining star. I imagine they did not have to cross a snowy plain or mountainside, like the one in this image, but the image of the wise men and their entourage, heading faithfully and diligently night-after-night, searching for a Messiah newly-born is heartwarming. And the most heartwarming part of all is the part where they decide to add a 'plot twist' after seeing the toddler Jesus... they do not return to Herod, but rather, spare Jesus' life and head a different direction.

This month we begin a new sermon series called "Snow Faith: Finding Spirituality in the Snow." This week we focus on the starry night in the snow. The Snow Epiphany, if you get my 'drift.'  Sunday is Epiphany Sunday, a Sunday when we recognize the journey of the wise men, awaken to our own inner yearnings to go a different way in order to keep Jesus alive in our own hearts and lives, and move in unexpected directions into the new year.

What breath-taking moments from the past can you carry with you into this new year?  What new light can you shine on the blanket of a new year, with no tracks as of yet tread upon it?  What ways can you bow down and worship Jesus and move forward to transform your world in 2014?

Email me or comment below.

Happy New Year!  Happy Epiphany!  May the 'light' be with you.

Keeping Christmas Well

Luke 2:1-20
another version

(From A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens)
Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more, and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for his was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed; and that was quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the  Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!

Scrooge has been through a lot with those three Spirits (Ghosts of Past, Present, and Future). He has felt the world he knew shift beneath his feet and alter his sense of what is right and what is wrong in the world. He has seen how his stinginess and uncaring, unkind spirit has created his own loneliness, his own despair, his own fate in life. But mostly he has seen how it has affected countless others around him, including children such as Tiny Tim. His heart is, to say it as Methodist founder John Wesley might, strangely warmed.  He sees the world a new way.

And so did all those in that beautiful account in Luke 2.  Mary's heart is changed when she gives birth to one who will save the world, even if she can't name yet.  Joseph's heart is changed when he is forced to put his family in an animal's stall or cave and help his wife to deliver this one who has been promised by the angel who came to him and to Mary.  The shepherds abiding in the fields... their hearts are changed when angels come down and shine all around them... they are at first terrified, and then strangely warmed by the message that a Messiah has been born in Bethlehem and they are the first to hear of it.

Christmas does that to us. It changes us. It sneaks in on us in the midst of candy canes and pine needles and makes us confront what we know is right and wrong in the world.  We, too, can see the message clearly proclaimed,  "Peace on earth, good will to all."  And we know, if only for this one night, we know very clearly that Christmas is worth doing right. It is worth keeping 'well,' as Scrooge found out.  May we always know what we must do, how we must change, who we must be to make Christmas 'well' for those around us.

Comments? Thoughts? Email me or comment below.  Merry Christmas, my beloved community!

The Crachits' Cry from the Wilderness

Isaiah 11:1-10
Matthew 3:1-12

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.  --from Isaiah 11


This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"from Matthew 3


"I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

--from Matthew 3

Charles Dickens is able to recreate such vivid images of child labor and workhouse conditions of debtors in his  novels because he survived such conditions himself. His dad was a gainfully employed man, but a man who had a debt of 40 pounds, which, in those days was the same as stealing 40 pounds.  So he had to go to debtor's prison and his son, twelve-year old Charles, had to work ten hours a day putting shoe polish in jars.

Dickens understood the injustices of life. He understood the need to pen words in protest to such a system. The fact that he did it also in his fiction works is genius.. a lasting testimony to a man whose purpose was to make life better for those around him. His works are a cry in the wilderness to those who are in power. A cry of protest from the midst of the pain. And once he was an established, praised and successful author, but one who remembered his painful past, all the better to be the voice of change.

John the Baptist is the cry from the wilderness we hear this week. He is crying out in the words of Isaiah, begging those gathered to prepare the way for one who is coming after him. One who will demand justice, who will baptize with the fire of the Spirit. One who will see to it that the weak are made strong, that even the child will be treasured, rather than discarded.

This week why not look at the ways we avoid the cry in the wilderness? The ways we drown out the cry of the needy with the LOUD CAROLS sung all around us....  How often, as we buy the sweater on sale for $17.99, do we consider that a little boy or girl much like the Cratchit children in Dickens' A Christmas Carol likely made it for pennies and by working long hours in awful conditions?

The United Nations estimates that worldwide one in six children under age fifteen works full time---around 150 million children.1 (Warren, Andrea, Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London, Houghton-Mifflin 2011, 143)

Scrooge's famous line "Are there no workhouses?" comes back to haunt him when the Ghost of Christmas Present shows him reality.   The cry from the wilderness is hard to hear when you spend all your time counting your own good fortune. It sometimes has to be forced upon us by haunting images.

Who are the Cratchits all around us? Why do we fail them so often? How can we open our hearts, minds, and doors to them not just during Advent and Christmas, but every minute of every day of the year?

Join us this Advent season as we explore the harsh and real theological beauty of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Thoughts? Email me or comment below.