Friday, December 30, 2022
Sixth Day of Christmas
Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Heaven comes down, and glory fills my soul
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, the peace into which you were called as one body. And be thankful.
We are free to be part of God’s one body. The peace that results in this virtual community surpasses any peace I can ever know alone. I was born and will die alone, in this simple, single body, but that does not ever mean that I exist alone in that lonely body.
This is a puzzle, of course, how my physical individuality defines nothing except my physical boundaries. God gives me my body to use interacting with others. I can only participate in community if I can step into it.
I think of Charles Dickens, who often refused dinner and party and concert invitations because he had to write. But his writing, that solitary task, generally revolved around the woes of individual men and women while they found their way into the community around them. Often the community found them. Always the human family brought healing to the misery they lived in alone.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, as in all wisdom you teach and admonish one another, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.
I can’t remember a time when spending a couple of hours either in church or Sunday School has not improved my mood. I am very thankful that over the years Margaret and I spent almost every Sunday in that kind of community, that kind of fellowship. Our relationship always feels more intimate and free after we’ve been with other folks who also know how loved they are by God. And I feel more free to “admonish” myself too, to notice, acknowledge and name my own sin. There is no fear in love.
Here is what Judy Cannato says about this:
Connectedness is fundamental to our reality. No matter which sphere of life we observe, from the physical to the spiritual, we are connected to others. Many of the social and ecological problems that confront us today stem from our delusion that we are separate from, better, or more significant than, other members of creation—from other groups of people we encounter, to the air we breathe. Our lack of openness to all may very well mean our demise. If we are to expand our hearts to include all creation, we need to embrace our capacity for communion. Relationship is something that all life requires.
We have never been separate from God except in our thoughts, but our thoughts don’t make it true! Nor are we separate from anyone else. Whatever separates us from one another—nationality, religion, ethnicity, economics, language—those are all just accidentals that will all pass away. We are One in God, with Christ and with one another. One word for overcoming that false sense of separateness, that illusory self, is heaven, and, quite frankly, that is what death offers us. It is simply returning to the Source from which we came, where all things are One.
Herbert Mason’s photograph, “War’s Greatest Picture, St. Paul’s Survives”
And finally Winston Churchill, who also had a way with words, spoke to his British countrymen during the eight month-long blitz of London in 1940 and 1941. On December 29, the German firebombing of the city destroyed much more than was destroyed 300 years earlier in the Great London Fire of 1666. But the British folks stood firm, and Churchill strove to inspire them still further:
If we stand up to Hitler all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail, then the whole world will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: “This was their finest hour.”
And indeed it was. Edward R. Murrow, reporting for CBS from London at that time, said, “Not once have I heard a man, woman, or child suggest that Britain should throw her hand in.” And on June 6, 1944 the D-Day armada, with its thousands of ships and planes, launched from the shores of Great Britain. Then just ten weeks later the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral, so nearly destroyed in that horrible firebombing, rang out to celebrate the liberation of Paris.
Whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
(Sirach 3, Colossians 3, Psalm 128, Matthew 2)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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