Tag: christmas

Epiphany

Posted on by petegath

Morning prayer begins, “O God, you are my God, I watch for you from the dawn. My soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you” (Psalm 63:1). As I pray, I hear guests arrive on the front porch. The morning is bitterly cold. A north wind cuts through clothing, touching the soul. On this Epiphany morning, no star is visible above, only grey clouds. 

The Magi sought the Christ child. What do I seek? What do our guests seek? I dare to think we seek some of the same things. On a dark and cold morning, we seek warmth and light. And we seek welcome, a place where we can be at ease, share stories, laugh, be ourselves. God knows we share a humanity, made in God’s image, but also wounded, broken, that image tarnished. So across divides and differences, we seek wholeness, a healing for our sin sick souls. We seek welcome.

Epiphany speaks to me this morning about the journey to find God in my life. To live into Epiphany I need to become conscious of God’s presence. Like the Magi, I need to recognize divine presence in something ordinary and yet extraordinarily joyous. For the Magi, that is a newborn baby, the Christ child. That child as a grown up tells me that I will find him in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31-46). 

This morning I found Christ in George who needed a new coat. He was fresh out of jail. The coat he had was not returned to him when he was released. When he tried on the coat he said, “This will do me fine; very fine.” At Manna House, in the ordinary offering of a coat to a guest, I suddenly felt an extraordinary joy. 

Something coalesced for me this morning that I had not found throughout Advent, nor on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. I found Christ in this home. This is not my home, nor the home of the guests. Rather, in this place I find welcome as I also offer welcome. It is Christ’s home. 

Maybe this is the spirit of Epiphany. The Magi with their gifts welcomed Christ as they were welcomed into Christ’s home. As Matthew tells the story, this hospitality quickly came to an end. Herod already sought the death of the newborn. And the Magi had to leave by a different route to avoid Herod. But for a moment there was hospitality in this home, the sharing of welcome, offered in joyous resistance to a world hellbent on death.

I was asked in a conversation later this same day, “Where do you find home?” Where is a place for me of love, of acceptance, of welcome, of rest, of deep emotional and spiritual ease? I am still pondering that question. But I also know I found home in a moment of Epiphany this morning. Warmth, light, welcome was shared; there was extraordinary joy against the grey and the cold.

Christmas Unprepared

Posted on by petegath

Christmas Unprepared

I could not recall a Christmas for which I was less spiritually prepared than this year. I had some good intentions, go to church, follow an Advent devotional, listen often to “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” and listen to the “O Antiphons.” 

I did none of those. Instead, life grabbed me in ways unanticipated, and unwanted. I will not share the details here, but there were disruptive and emotionally difficult developments, both personal and public.

This morning at Manna House, in my prayer time before opening, I sat with my lack of preparation for Christmas. I made some attempts at rationalization. But I ultimately accepted that I failed. I did not prepare for and was not ready to celebrate the birth of Christ.

With that weighing down my heart, I left off my prayer time and started preparing Manna House for this morning’s hospitality. I engaged in the routine preparation: fill the sugar and creamer dispensers, and put them out on the table in the backyard, along with the water cooler; take out all the items to be given out for “socks and hygiene” and place them in the counter on the back porch; take out the 100 cup coffee pot, coffee cups, stir sticks, and vitamins and place them at the coffee serving station; wipe off the picnic tables; and finally start the space heater in the warming center for our guests. I did what I do each morning to prepare Manna House for hospitality.

As I neared the end of this work of preparation to welcome our guests, an old familiar scripture came to mind, Matthew 25:31-46. Jesus begins to teach saying, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.” Then he describes a judgment based upon whether we fed the hungry, gave the thirsty something to drink, gave clothes to those who needed them, took care of the sick, and visited those in prison. Jesus underlines that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

I had prepared for the presence of Christ after all.

Christmas “is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making the crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, tired hearts refreshed, dead hopes stir with newness of life. It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of everyday, the movement of life in defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, that right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil” (Thurman, The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations, p. xiv).