Watch if you want.
Or, just close your eyes and allow the music to sink deeply into your heart, mind and soul.
O come Desire of Nations, bind all peoples in one heart and mind.
Bid envy, strife and discord cease.
Fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.
Prepare – Day 6
“When you pray, move your feet.” – African proverb
Yesterday the Daily News had this as its front page.
It challenged all of us who, in response to tragedy or need or hardship or sorrow, pray.
And, it reminded us that praying without moving our feet is void of power and meaning.
So, to those of us who pray, as we prepare for Christmas, this reminder.
If you pray for peace, somehow and somewhere work for peace and justice and understanding.
If you pray for an end to hunger, help feed those who are hungry.
If you pray for understanding between people, be the who steps towards the stranger.
If you pray for hope, be the one who somehow builds hope where you live.
If you pray for God to be present, be God to another.
I often conclude my prayers with this:
May our lives follow where our prayers first lead.
So, as we prepare for Christmas, may we find the courage to follow our prayers into the wonder and complexity of the world as it is. A world God continues to love so very much.
Prepare – Day 5
A quote I keep turning back towards is this:
If they get you asking the wrong questions they don’t have to worry about the answers.
So, today, as I continue my preparation for Christmas with no answers in sight, I will do my best to ask the right questions.
What does it mean to say God with us in the face of the tragedy in San Bernardino and all those other places where anger and violence destroys lives and communities? And, what does it mean to sing about Peace on Earth as we remember the terrorist attack in Paris and the chaos in Syria and the desperate flight of hundreds of thousands refugees?
As I said, I have now answers.
And, if I attempted any answer right now it would sound empty and today platitudes do more harm than good. What I think I know is this. In the midst of everything else you and I do to get ready for Christmas, we also need to plunge in deeply and to carve out time to live with and to think about and to pray about what God with us and Peace on Earth ask of us so we can be ready for the kind of Christmas the world needs when Christmas comes.
Prepare – Day 4
When it comes comes to getting ready for Christmas, I am fortunate.
I think.
I am fortunate because some part of my “job” requires me to put my words and my life alongside the meaning of these days and around the sometimes too familiar Biblical texts we associate with Advent and Christmas.
Sometimes that task is deeply satisfying.
Like in those moments when I feel I come close to what is important.
Other times it feels stressful and scary.
My ordinary words alongside that timeless story.
My feeble words alongside the dream of swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and God wth us especially when the headlines in the news are of another mass shooting and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Yet, plunging into what all that means for you and me today is the risk we must take if we want to find our place in that narrative which is both thousands of years old and startling new at the very same time. At least, that is, if we want to go deeper than holiday cheer and jolly old St. Nicholas and, for a moment stand on the side of God’s grand dream meant for us and for all.
A voice cries in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord…”
We know all too well the wilderness which surrounds us.
Now we have to figure out the prepare part.
Prepare – Day 2
I am not a liturgical purist.
No surprise there…at least to anyone who knows me.
So, today, amidst the phone calls I have made and the visit to a friend to see her new twin granddaughters and the planning for who will do what in worship this Sunday, I am listening to Christmas music. I know it is Advent, but the music, even when it is just in the background transforms all the other tasks I have to do and reminds me of where I and we are headed.
Towards Christmas.
And, to all that means.
And, to all the hope wrapped up in the story of the birth of a child and an angel’s song and a star in the sky.
So, if you are like me and long for that reminder in the midst of the headlines in the news and the busyness of today, listen… Indeed, O God, as we prepare for Christmas bring us/lead us in the direction of peace.
Prepare
The word for this first week in Advent is Prepare.
Yesterday afternoon I made my way into our attic to find our box of Christmas lights. What I was looking for were the candles we put in each of upstairs windows. A part of my Advent tradition is to have them in place and lit beginning with the first Sunday in Advent, and on each evening through Epiphany. Other decorations – tree, angels, Christmas stockings – will follow and will find their assigned place in our home, but the candles always come first.
A simple light in our windows.
But for me they are also reminder and hope and witness.
A light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.