12-30-23

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
December 30, 2023
Today is the day that Donna and I celebrate the anniversary of our wedding ceremony. Though we will celebrate without much fanfare today (we are going on a cruise later in January as our official hoopla), it remains a day filled with memory and immeasurable joy. As I often say, it is ONLY by the grace of God that another human being has put up with me all these years. Along with our anniversary, December 30 is the day in the Christian calendar when we celebrate the Holy Family—Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. Tomorrow in worship, we will look at one of the few passages that provides us with any information about this family in their earliest days/weeks. It’s interesting how they did the usual stuff as required by their faith tradition, including a trip to the temple. And there at the temple, people were waiting to celebrate. Now please understand that I am not attempting to draw a correlation between my family and the Holy Family. Yet I think it is wonderful that we find Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus doing what ordinary people would have done—they went to the temple for a blessing and an offering of gratitude. It sort of feels as if that wasn’t necessary for them, yet I want to believe that what made them the Holy Family was their lives being an intersection of the sacred and the ordinary. And then, if I can take it one more step and say that I believe this moment in scripture does not, in fact, reveal something out of the ordinary, but is a window through which we are able to see every family and relationship as sacred, whether a marriage, friendship, mentorship, etc. Don’t get me wrong—I still hold in great respect the original Holy Family, yet I think part of their purpose was to remove the divide that religion has often imposed between “the sacred and the profane.” As I look at the message of Jesus, from his birth to his death, I find a God who is present in every moment and every situation. Recognizing that Holy Presence in what we might call the mundane requires a new set of lenses and a very different perspective, yet I sort of believe the birth of Jesus and his first few weeks of life help give us the new vision that suggest that all is sacred.

Holy and Magnificent God, give me eyes to see and a heart made available to an understanding of life that you have brought to us. Even where the world has said that something is unholy and beyond redemption, the Jesus story tells me that you are already present in ways that I need to be able to name. Help me with my capacity to see. Amen.