"Midnight Sky" tells the story of a scientist living alone in a research outpost in the far North who is one of the only people to survive a global catastrophe that killed most of the planet's inhabitants.  As a result of the catastrophe (whose precise nature is never fully explained), the planet's air is toxic and unbreathable.  No one will live above ground again.

    One day, however, he hears from a spaceship, Aether, on its way from Jupiter back to earth.  He tells them to go back to Jupiter's inhabitable moon.

     

    At this point, only two crew members, a man and woman, are still on the ship.  She's pregnant.  What to do?

    

    They leave to start a new world.

    

    What would you do?  Would you take a chance on a new world?  Or would you brave your way into the decimated old?

    

    Put another way, what are you most willing to trust:  what you hope in the new or what you remember from the old?  As we go into 2022, ponder this question.  Ponder your life, ponder God:  what is most worth knowing?

    Happy New Year!

    Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.

    Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If the Creator has come, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.

    

    What has made has come to what it has made.
    

    Christmas reminds us that we live in a universe of meaning.  And that we could not live otherwise.  Christmas also tells us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it is birthed in a spoken origination of space and time, a definitive genesis of all that is real and true.  It is only then that it can be.
    

    Christmas is only the beginning of what we see.

 

    Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.

    But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, struck anew by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds.  In the twenty-first century, most of us do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, shepherds were an integral part of the economy.

    Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low, the modern day equivalent of the Roma of Europe.  Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations.

   But the shepherds were the first to know.  They were the first to be told.  Before anyone else knew, the shepherds knew about the birth of Messiah.

    God remembered those whom the world had forgotten.

    Christmas reminds us that when all is said and done, we should understand that God, the vastness of personal transcendence, is not about greatness.  He's about humility.  Humble thankfulness for the fact of existence.

    And love.  Love for a humanity who had dismissed and fogotten about him.

    Merry Christmas!

     As many of us enjoy our Christmas season amidst our varying degrees of affluence, we must not overlook those among us who, in what for most is one of the happiest times of the year, are suffering.  In countless ways.  In particular, I am thinking about the people of Ukraine, pummeled daily by the missiles of a person deluded by a dream of lost empire.  Bereft of heat and electricity, thousands of Ukrainians are suffering horribly.

    I think also of the millions in Africa who are likewise affected by the maniacal actions of this person in Moscow.  Due to this person's perfidy, these millions cannot get sufficient grain to make bread.  A vast famine is imminent.

    Moreover, how many more millions, those who live close to the borders of Russia, who labor daily under the threat of invasion, their lives and livelihood hanging by a too slender thread, remain?  Too many.

    Closer to home, I think about one of our neighbors whose mother passed away shortly after Christmas last year, enduring his own sense of grief.  Christmas will be very different for him and his family this year.

    And then I wonder, given the innately divine goodness and purposefulness of the world, how to put it all together.  More than ever we are to be reminded  f how much we, walking as "in a riddle," need to believe in it.

    And, in the biggest picture, very little more.

      If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may know that today, December 21, is the winter solstice.  The "shortest" day of the year.  Or as Robert Frost puts it in his "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "the darkest night."  Happily, although it may not seem like it, the winter solstice is actually the grand turning point of the year, the day and night in which time and light begin to grow.  It's the end of the light, yes, but its genesis, too.  We lose, yet we win, moving, ever so slightly, toward the greater light to come. 

    I love the winter.  I love how it masks and shrouds, I love how it engages reflection, I love how it sends us into places we would not otherwise go.  And I love how winter helps us "see" what sight can be.  As we trek through these darker days, we come to understand that light is not illumination only.  Light is rather the underlying rhythm of all creation, a continuity of divine favor, a favor that speaks in gloom as well as joy, a favor that underscores the fact of a purposeful planet:  "The Light of the world."

      

     

    Step into the darkness, treasure the light.  Enjoy the marvel of a remarkably consistent--and persistent--personal creation.

    As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event, Christmas, I think frequently about its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world. 

    Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.

     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived for a time in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.

    But this is precisely the point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known.  In Jesus, the poor and forgotten refugee, resided the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, be it our views about immigration, aliens, refugees, or anything else, we really do not.

    But isn't that what God is all about?

 

    Hanukkah (Chanukah) has begun!  Although it is a minor holiday on the Jewish liturgical calendar, because Hanukkah usually occurs around Christmas, it has tended to generate a significant amount of attention in the Western world.  For some, it is considered the Jewish "equivalent" of Christmas.

    While this conclusion is far from the historical and theological truth, it does communicate an important point.  Although Chanukah commemorates the rededication of the Temple after it had been profaned by the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes (he sacrificed a pig on the inner altar) in the second century B.C.E. and not the birth of Jesus, it is nonetheless a time to rejoice.

    To rejoice in lights.  To rejoice in the light and faithfulness of God, to delight in God's continuing bestowal of life and illumination to human beings.  Chanukah reminds us that whether we know it or not, each day we walk in the grace of a infinitely remarkable light, a light without which we would not be.

    The light of a personal God.