Dear Church,
As we approach Christmas let us keep in mind:
God chose to enter the human story in a poor family, from the marginalized region of Galilee, at a time of intense colonial oppression, to parents who suffered shame because of his birth, to a lineage with royalty and scandal and outsiders and faithlessness and faithful all included.
What does this reality tell us about the nature of God? About how love works and why God would choose such conditions under which to be born?
I don’t think it a coincidence Jesus was born an ostracized, colonized, stigmatized, marginalized, impoverished Jew. It tells us something important about how God works, where God’s activity is welcomed, the sorts of injustices God will submit to and live under.
God isn’t pushed away by our shame, indifferent to our sufferings, unmoved by our poverty. We see in the Incarnation a God who willingly, even joyfully, moves toward the lowly and disenfranchised to reveal who he is. Even if it takes 30 years – almost a generation- for God’s work to be revealed. Even if God’s work temporarily increases ostracization or division. Even if only a handful of people – and powerless outsiders at that – have any clue what God is up to when God moves in.
May Christmas offer us the gift of wonder: to delight that God’s work takes time to be revealed, that even now God’s working in ways we can discern, that it’s often in the most unlikely, least esteemed, places and people, and that we can receive the good news of “God with us”‘” right here, even as we read this email.
What does God being with you right now change? What could it change?
Readying alongside you for the coming of hope, peace, joy, and love,
Fr. Matt
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