"AT THE HEART OF LIFE"

    "AT THE HEART OF LIFE"

        We have arrived at Advent, and Christmas is coming on fast.  The secular culture begins early on this in order to sell us the products, to sell us the items that will make us feel better, that make us feel as if we are somebody.  The standing joke in our family was that like the woman with the unstoppable flow of blood who sought healing simply by touching the hem of Jesus' garments, we are taught that all we have to do to find healing in American culture is to touch the hem of the products.  Who needs Jesus, when we've got the products?

        Yet no matter how cynical one becomes about this season, there is something about it. Something that asks us to reach down into our core values and find ourselves and find others,  Advent and Christmas are like magnets, pulling on our souls, asking us to consider one more time, asking us to believe one more time that life has meaning, that our lives have meaning.  The Christmas story asks us to consider one more time that at the heart of life, at the heart of out lives, love and justice are the core values.  

        I went to the hospital this week to see an Oakhurst member, and I can never go in a hospital in the Christmas season without thinking of the Christmas of 1993, when my mother was a passenger in a horrible automobile wreck on Highway 61 near Tunica, Mississippi.  Mother and Bob and Mary Wetzel were on the way back from Memphis after Christmas shopping, when they were hit head on by a drunk driver, who was coming back from the first casino that had opened in Tunica.  The drunk driver was hardly injured, but Mother and the Wetzels were seriously injured and were not expected to live.  I flew out to Memphis the next day, and that trip began a long journey for all of us.  Mother was 74 years old, but she fought to recover, and after several major surgeries and three months in the hospital and rehab, she returned to her beloved Helena home, as did Mary and Bob Wetzel.  All during this sojourn with Mother, i was met by love and caring by family members (Caroline held us all together), relatives (Jean Armour Burrow), neighbors, Wetzel family members, by old friends (Brown and Kaye Higgins chief among them), by Oakhurst church which raised money for my frequent trips back and forth to Memphis to check on Mother and to help her recover.

        That memory of Christmas 1993 is both painful and joyful.  As I wondered whether Mother would survive (and how she would survive, if she did), I was met in all the hospital rooms with signs of Christmas, signs of hope and joy and peace.  It is a reminder that even the most cynical of us are drawn to Christmas because it offers us a glimpse of hope.  Some see Christmas as a respite of the woes and worries of the world, but I see it as a vision that seeks to go deeper into the layers of life, that seeks to help us have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to receive, as did Mary and Joseph and Zechariah and Elizabeth and the shepherds and the magi, and a host of other characters.  

        Christmas asks us to consider that life has meaning, that at the heart of life are love and justice,  In today's world - but in any world - that is a crazy assertion to make, but Christmas asks us to consider it.  We tend towards sentimentality and consumerism in this season, but love and justice are the answers to these human tendencies.  Justice because it asks us to expand the borders of our hearts and our imaginations, to see a vision that is deeper and broader than we thought possible.  Justice because it prevents love's longing at Christmas from becoming simply sentimentality, because it slows down the fading of Christmas long after the decorations are back in the attic, and the brutal winter of January shrinks our hearts and our vision.

        Yet, at the heart of Christmas is love, the power that is necessary to bring us out of ourselves and to see others as those like ourselves.  Christmas asserts that love is at the heart of the universe, and only its power can call us out of ourselves and our narrow vision.  Working for justice requires love (without it, seeking justice will only burn us out and shrivel our vision).  Seeking justice prevents love from becoming only sentimentality, but without love, all our efforts are just noisy gongs or clanging cymbals, as the apostle Paul once put it.  Christmas asserts that life has meaning - that meaning is that love and justice are intertwined and are at the heart of life. We'll be looking at those in this season - may you know those powerful forces in these days.