“It is as if every emotion we have is intensified on Christmas,” writes Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde.
She goes on, “If it’s joy we feel, then we are intensely joyful. If we’re excited, we’re not just a little excited; we’re really excited. If sorrow or grief is our offering, the depth of it reaches deep into our bones. If we are inclined toward gratitude, then our hearts are bursting with it. But if it’s loss or emptiness that we bring, then it is the greatest of loss.”
I sat down to finish the sermon for Sunday and had to take a moment to calm down! There is so much I have yet to do for the holiday, so much I have already done that has put me “behind” with other things, plus the deep responsibility of mounting the stairs to the pulpit and trying to convey the word of God! “No doctrine ever seems so threadbare,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “as when I have just finished defending it.”
Yup. I get that.
So join me in pausing for a few moments, taking a breath, and remembering that it is not in the grand gestures and the ornamented occasions that Jesus is born. It is in small things and small beginnings. It is in the ordinary. The unexpected. The unanticipated pleasure of sitting alone in front of a fireplace. The gift of peace driving down a neighborhood street on a quiet night. A baby born in a stable.
“There is one thing we can do to make ready for God,” Mariann writes. “It has to do with trusting small things and small beginnings.” This may mean trusting that the tiny voice of comfort we hear in our grief will be amplified in the coming months, trusting that peace will come to our hearts and to the world (yes, even that), trusting that love will somehow find its way into our own hearts this season and that we will be given the will and the means to birth these things in the lives of others.
In Sunday’s Gospel, Mary visits her friend and cousin Elizabeth, partly, I think, to make sense of what is happening to her. We are invited to join her.
See you in church.
Barbara
