When the Christmas-y Spirit starts to fade

 

God of new days and New Years, that can feel suspiciously like old years.  The past pains often refuse to stay put on December 31 when we hang a new calendar.  We know that peaceful words stop falling from our tongues when we put away the tree.  Our human efforts at love in the air dissipates and disappears quickly when our online music takes down the Christmas music station.  Help us, O God, for our good intentions and resolutions and resolve only take us so far.  Help us, O God, to find the courage and conviction to be light in places where there is too much anger and hate.  Stir within us grace when our inner-defense lawyer wants to argue and prove a point to that person who is pushing all our buttons.  Heal us for all that pulls us away (often in too many directions) from the truths that You are with us and for us ~ and that “us” includes all that was, is and will ever be.  Like images from the universe that continue to evolve and expand, we can’t wrap our minds around Your grace and love and justice and peace.  Our humanness, which is to say our limitedness, stumbles and we don’t like to look foolish God.  So help us this day and every day this year.  Meet us in the messy mangers of life, where unlike Jesus, there is crying we make away in our manger of life.  Meet us amid the scratchy straw, the angels singing, the fleeting moments of love, and the beauty of every day that You have made.  Honestly, openly, willingly, this is HOW we will make it through this day and year.  Amen. And Amen.  

Still Christmas

 

As we celebrate the New Year, in the church we are still in the season of Christmas.  We are still harking with the angels, hasting with the shepherds, lowing with the cattle, and traversing a-faring with the Wise Ones.  I know all the decorations are on clearance at the store, if not completely gone to make way for Valentine’s Day.  I know the world is now pushing forward forgetting the smell of the dusty, drafty, dirty barn.  But as people of faith, we keep singing and showing up and sharing the good news of great joy for all the people.  Too often we forget that in John 3, Jesus says, “For God so loves the world!”  Not just the humans you like, but all people and all creatures (great and small) and the world.  So may these words bless you and guide you ~ inspire and infuse you and me and we in the coming days.  From Howard Thurman, ‘When the Song of the Angels is Stilled’

 

When the carols have been stilled,

When the star-topped tree is taken down,

When family and friends are gone home,

When we are back to our schedules

The work of Christmas begins:

   To welcome the refugee,

   To heal a broken planet,

   To feed the hungry,

   To build bridges of trust, not walls of fear,

   To share our gifts,

   To seek justice and peace for all people,

   To bring Christ’s light to the world.

Prayers for a New Year

 

Happy New Year!!  This week I am inviting you to listen to your life ~ your heart, soul, mind, body, all that is within you and around you.  To slow down and breathe today.  You don’t have to have the next 365 days all plotted and planned.  You don’t need an alphabetized resolution list that you will grind your way through with grit.  Your salvation (which is to say your wholeness and integration and faithfulness) is not based on what you do.  God’s love (which is to say the healing and hope ~ our very ground of being) is unconditional and unceasing.  God’s love doesn’t give grades or badges to put on your heavenly sash.  Sorry, no jewels for your heavenly crown…no extra credit for carrying the cross…no earning your way.  Your way is paved with grace upon heaping helping of grace.  But what happens when we don’t feel that way?  What happens when our inner critic goes into hyperdrive or says the thing we did not want to say out loud…in public…for everyone (and God) to hear?  What then?  We breathe.  We ask for forgiveness.  We lean into everlasting arms of healing and hope and love from God.  We return again and again and again to who we are (God’s child) and whose we are (God’s beloved) to live those truths again.  May that bless you each day in 2025.  And here is another blessing for you.

 

Entering the New Year

God of all time, help us enter the New Year quietly,

thoughtful of who we are to ourselves and to others,

mindful that our steps make an impact and our words carry power.

May we walk gently.

May we speak only after we have listened well.

Creator of all life, help us enter the New Year reverently, aware that you have endowed every creature and plant, every person and habitat with beauty and purpose.

May we regard the world with tenderness.

May we honor rather than destroy.

Lover of all souls, help us enter the New Year joyfully, willing to laugh and dance and dream,

remembering our many gifts with thanks and looking forward to blessings yet to come.

May we welcome your lavish love. May we cast off the small, vindictive god our fears have made. May the grace and peace of Christ bless us now and in the days ahead.

- Vinita Hampton Wright 

 

Blessed are you, my friends, especially when/where there is no evidence to prove that.  Amen.