CHRISTMAS PRESENT?

"For my grace is sufficient for you; and my power is made perfect in weakness."

--2 Corinthians 12: 9

Each year, around this time, I sing a song to my children that goes like this:

 "Christmas is coming/the goose is getting fat/

please put a penny in the old man's hat;

if you haven't got a penny/a ha' penny will do;

if you haven't got a ha' penny/then God bless you!"

Truthfully, I can't remember when I learned this song? Sometimes I suspect it just bursts forth from my collective Scots-Irish-English DNA. I don't even know it's origin, but I know I love to sing it; and my children seem to tolerate hearing it year after year.

Singing is what angels did that first Christmas in a field of sheep, under a sky of stars, to the least likely of people, shepherds. Evidently, it's what stars do, too: sing (remember God's question to Job: "Where were you when the morning stars sang together?"). And, it was a star God used to announce, in a very quiet way, the most extraordinary event of all time: the birth of the Savior of the world.

This Advent (the forty days that proceed Christmas) I hope we notice... not only stars, but the extraordinarily ordinary ways God shows up: in the poor, the least, the vulnerable--a baby!--whose extraordinary truth and life and love has the power, paradoxically, to change the world and us...

...inspiring our songs and, if we're willing, our reconciliation and forgiveness?

For what is Christmas without our willingness to give, forgive, and love?

"Christmas is coming..."

Yours in Christ's Service,

A Pastor in the Desert