But what if, what if…by attending to those in most need,

Jesus is healing something in us, too?

What if saying “it’s not all about you”

really is the most loving, caring thing Jesus could say?

What is important is that we try to articulate what we believe. And what is more important is that we live what we believe. We can confidently, boldly take risks, live our call to be a community of faith that serves this neighborhood, serves our neighbors because we can trust in the rock that is the foundation against which nothing, not even the powers of death can prevail.

We don’t get peace by doing our best to stay out of each other’s way, by remaining strangers, by associating primarily with people who share our style, our politics, or our class. We don’t get peace by lauding diversity online while living our enfleshed daily lives in largely homogeneous settings. These days, encountering the Other

seems to me to be more about coming to know people whose worldviews differ significantly from ours,more than any other kind of difference. And to encounter this kind of difference, we often have to go pretty far “out of our way.” Maybe not as far as the Magi traveled to meet Jesus,but on journeys of risk and trust and hope, nevertheless.

In the days after Christmas, many of us lift our weary heads off the pillow, look around and say, is that all? Somehow that wasn’t quite what I expected. What do I have to show for it all? What am I left with?

My prayer for us this Christmas is that we slow down and see God’s story unfolding around us—in our lives and in the world around us...that we see the impossible being done through the unlikely—through you and me. Watch. See. It happens all the time.

As inheritors of Christ’s priesthood in baptism: how might we stage unexpected indictments of the injustice and terror and devastation in the world around us? For hot-tempered, self-righteous indignation seems to me to change very little…seems like more of just the same… more of what we ultimately wish to eradicate: a culture ruled by antagonism and hatred.

The horrific events of the last few weeks, specifically the attacks on Paris and Beirut have left most of us reeling—grief stricken, afraid, unsure what to do. We viscerally responded to the pictures of cities devastated and under fire—we remembered what that looked and felt like. The images reminded us that for some time now we have felt like the world is less safe than we think it should be, reminded us that we are scared to our core.

It is difficult, with our minds that want to sort everything into neat, perfectly oppositional categories—to grasp that while each of us does in fact have infinite value to God, so does everything else on this planet. That the whole web of life is of vast importance to God, breathes God’s own breath. That God looks at everything crawling, swimming, flying, running, walking on this earth and it all makes the holy eyes twinkle.

What do we think might happen if we just slowed down and let go for a while? I don’t know—but whatever it is it scares the life out of us. And that fear has caused a painful separation in our lives—from God, from each other, and from God’s marvelous creation. The air that we breathe, the water we drink, the birds whose song lifts our hearts, the flowers that delight our sense of smell, these are not resources, these are fellow creatures, created by God just as we are—and beloved of God.

From the time Adam and Eve decided apples were on the menu we have been self-centered, have had an urge to put ourselves in God’s place. We have read Scripture as if we were the main character—using it as evidence that we are the most important things in the world. We have mostly ignored the Book of Nature with its breathtaking array of life—of God’s other beloved. We have ignored the creation story other creatures might tell.