[Faith-talk] Good Night Message for Thursday, December 6 2012

[Paul]

Well folks.  It's time to put St. Nicholas to bed for a year, so to speak, as December 6 is his day on many calendars.  I hope that we in North America had a good day today, and that you in other places are enjoying a good Friday morning or afternoon.

Marj Leegard contributed the article we have for you today.  Before I give it to you, an explanation of several terms used in it.  Ms. Leegard is obviously of probably Norwegian or Scandinavian descent, and she uses several terms not readily understandable in English.  The sweet delacicies "lefse" and "Krumkaker," the latter probably referring to "crumb cake" are those that she is familiar with, but not necessarily the rest of us.  Anyway her article is entitled "The Hopes and Fears of All the Years," rendered as follows:

Bethlehem.  Tiny village of song, or besieged, battered center of war? Peace on earth? We long for that hill with with resting sheep and shepherds ready to watch through the night.  We want to see the miracle of God in human form in a baby sheltered in a manger.  We want to be there and experience Christmas again.  The way it was.  Christmas seems never to be the same as it was.  Not even as fine as last year.

A little porcelain village depicting life at the turn of the 19th century sets the scene.  Few of the decorations on the tree are the latest style or color.  The twigs are covered with the green and gold, the satin and chenille of years gone by.  Of childhood long past.  While we are making the Christmas of our memory, our children and grandchildren are absorbing now the foundation of memories Christmas will hold for them.

Mary, Joseph, the angels, the shepherds, the very straw in the barn that served as a birthing place, the taxation policies--all were there that first Christmas.  Even the star moving across the heavens toward Judea was part of the story.  We can hardly separate all of life from the birth at Bethlehem.

Could it be that vanilla and sugar and butter culminating in Ooma's sugar cookies are not an intrusion but part of the story, too? And that Grandpa's thin lefse, buttered and lightly sprinkled with sugar, belongs in the narrative, too?

God began the story in the world as it is.

There was a time when we could look at the turmoil in the world at a distance.  Even Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, seemed distant to us on the mainland.  Now we are part of the battlefield.  The front lines.  The physical place of carnage and death and pain and fear.  We live in a battlefield of ideas, too.  Freedom.  Government by all or by those with privilege and power.  A people who respect each other or a people who subject women and children to less than personhood.  We want to cry out, "Why can't Christmas be the way it used to be? Clean and pure and holy?" And then the answer comes.  This is the world in which God's love and grace are present.  This is the Bethlehem world our Savior entered.

The promise of peace on earth lives in the prayers and the actions of people who have heard God's promise.  "Unto you is born a Savior" happens again when your faith provides food for the hungry.  "Unto you" happens when you visit someone longing for a friend.

The shephers could hardly wait to get from the lonely pasture to a place where people gathered so they could tell the story.

>From our Christmas trees, lefse sticks, and krumkaker irons, from our families gathered at our tables, from the warmth and joy of our Sunday school programs, may we hasten to tell the story.  We have seen Christmas again.  The Christmas of God's promise.  Peace on earth!

And there you have it for today.  Before I close, I'd like to give you a Christmas quote from a person whom you might not consider as having written a Christmas saying, but he did.  It was the blind poet John Milton who wrote:  "But peaceful was the night wherein the Prince of Light, His reign of peace upon the earth began." Don't know from which of his works this was taken, but it is still good nevertheless after at least 400 years.

And now may the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob just keep us safe, individually and collectively, throughout this night or day and especially in these last days in which we live.  Your Christian friend and brother, Paul