Dear Beloved Community,
Most every year, we mark the third Sunday of Advent with our service of Lessons & Carols. Fitting on Joy Sunday, right? Our Sanctuary walls are still reverberating with the glorious sound!
And every year, I have the immense privilege to read the ninth and final lesson: the Prologue of the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word,” John writes, full of mystery and hope as well as grace and truth. As the granddaughter of a Johannine scholar, these words of the Word have magnified through our family’s story. As a pastor of such beloveds whose faces shine like the sun (always, but especially on Joy Sunday!), these words are ones I can barely speak each year. The clutch of Light grabs hold of my heart and my throat.
I think of you: you who hold up the sky for your families and communities. You who ache under the weight of a grief that never lets you go. You who fears are now great for the marginalized, the underserved, the fragile, the hunted. You who stand in the in between: between hope and despair, possibility and monotony, near and far.
I think of us: our beloved church whose home is on Fifth Street and whose heart beats for the world. We who tell this old, old story in light of God’s ever-widening mercy. We who welcome the newcomer and celebrate the saints. We who find beloved community called “church” — despite all the odds! — in ways we may never have imagined.
I think of our ancestors of the faith: followers of Jesus in all times and places who have incarnated the good news again and again. Our ancestors who heard John’s haunting invitation to consider Word made flesh and to find Jesus’s tent pitched among them. Our ancestors who broke the bread, and sang the songs, and opened the scriptures, and carried the Christ-light, and followed the Way so that we might hear it, tell it, sing it, live it.
I think of God: God whose hope begins in the dark like a seed pressing up from the hard, packed soil. Whose gift of peace is presence and a call to not be afraid. Who makes all joy precise. Whose love is the greatest story of them all.
With Sunday’s songs in my heart, John’s holy words in my spirit, and you in my eyes, Spirit came near. Music ushered her here for me, and perhaps for you too. Among us, the Light shone in the darkness – the Light shines in every darkness – and the darkness did not, cannot, will not overcome it.
May Spirit stay close on these longest, darkest nights. May Spirit surprise us in the prophetic song of Mary we’ll hear again on Sunday. And may Spirit meet “the hopes and fears of all the years” in the cry of a babe as we gather manger-side on Christmas Eve.
May the clutch of Light be near to each of you this year!
Together in God’s work of Love,
Pastor Emily