E-Blast!

Tis the week before Christmas, I hope you have time
to ponder some thoughts in a blog launched in rhyme.

While words are important, there's no time to spare;
Ill get straight to the point, nothing else would be fair.

For this is your week of proofing and press,
and last-minute practice--predictable stress.

And that is the reason I give you this verse;
to help you remember, (and not make it worse)

the purpose of Christmas, the Word from above
is really quite simple: its all about Love.

Christina Rossetti, at age fifty-five
created a poem that kept hope alive.

For years she had battled disease and distress,
and yet, through her lyrics, her faith she confessed.

Her writing was simple her words brief and clear;
the child in the manger was more than just dear,

and Christmas was more than a moment in time;
as God, now incarnate, revealed Love divine.

In his first pastoral letter, St. John wrote, Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love. God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real lovenot that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other (1 John 4:711 NLT).

It is this message of Christmas in its simplest form that inspired Rossetti to write an equally simple and profound Christmas hymn:

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and Angels gave the sign.

Worship we the Godhead,
Love Incarnate, Love Divine;
Worship we our Jesus;
But wherewith for sacred sign?

Love shall be our token,
Love be yours and love be mine,
Love to God and all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.

Consider these words closely as you make your final Christmas preparations. This is our message: Love was born at Christmas. Not just a lovely child or a lovely thought, but GodLove now veiled in flesh. The only clues we had to the true identity of this homeless child were a star and some vociferous angels.

So, what do we do? What can we do? We can worship this Jesus, this Emmanuel--God with us, Love with us, the fulfillment of every prophesy, the fulfillment of the Covenant. But how? Twenty-one hundred years later were still asking how mere humans can adequately worship God whose preferred pronoun is Love.

Jesus himself gives us the answer: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments (Matthew 22:3740, NIV).

All well and good, but how do we love our neighbor? How do we incarnate Love in 2025? A century after Rossetti, another poet put the commandment of Jesus in unavoidable day-in day-out terms:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among all,
To make music in the heart.

The Reverend Dr. Howard Thurman, from The Mood of Christmas, p. 23
Friends United Press, Richmond, IN, 1985

There it is. The gift and sign that we can give our Lord and our world is love not the temporary if-we-get-around-to-it kind of love but an up close and personal experience of God who is Love: finding, healing, feeding, releasing, rebuilding. Since God brought Love to us at Christmas, how can we do anything less for our neighbors the rest of the year?

All too soon the preparations and presentations of Christmas 2024 will be just a memory. However, our incarnation of Love is the lasting Christmas. As we finish our Advent and celebrate Christs birth this next week, I pray we who are apprentices of Jesus will find renewed hope, deepened faith, resilient joy, and lasting peace in the Love that came down at Christmas, and that we, each and all, become living proof of that Love throughout 2025.