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About Those Christmas Lights
Thus says the Lord: Again you shall take your tambourines, and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers. Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant, and shall enjoy the fruit. – Jeremiah 31:2a, 4b-5 (NRSV)
I love Christmas lights. String them across your windows on the day after Thanksgiving—fabulous! Weave them through trees and bushes in your yard on the day after Halloween, even—delightful!
Bring on the small white lights, twinkling through long winter nights. Let there be colorful bulbs wrapped around gates and fences, blazing like commercialized Northern Lights. Shine a light on upside-down Santa Claus legs in the chimney. Turn on the bright nose of a blow-up Rudolph. Set up a glowing display of candy canes or penguins or baby Jesuses. I’m here for it!
But please, no matter how early you indulge in the joyful glow of Christmas, I’m begging you now: don’t be in a rush to put away all that bright plastic immediately after December 25th. Let the light linger. Allow a bit of garish decor to carry the joy of Christmas into January. Perhaps even February.
Because I, for one, continue to need beacons of hope long after the Christmas presents have been put away. I continue to long for a glimmer of wonder long after the Christmas tree has dropped all its needles and foiled the vacuum’s best efforts.
The good news that leads us like a reindeer’s red nose through Advent; the good news that delivers extravagant joy at Christmas; that same good news does not dim with the dawning of December 26th. That same good news is no less captivating, no less ostentatious, no less foolish and fun just because the stores end their holiday sales.
Keep those Christmas lights burning a little longer this year, remembering that the good news is like a long and loud tambourine dance, an outrageously abundant feast, and a bright light of love that outshines every grief and injustice.
Prayer: Keep the lamp within my soul trimmed and burning, O Faithful God, so that my joy in your love overflows.
cross-posted with the UCC Daily Devotional
Widows and Orphans
Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims—laws that make misery for the poor, that rob people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children. Who will help you on Judgment Day? – Isaiah 10:1-3 abridged (MSG)
If you want, Microsoft Word will take care of widows and orphans for you. In fact, managing widows and orphans is the program’s default setting, which means Microsoft Word is caring for widows and orphans the whole world ‘round.
Who knew, right? Injustices against society’s most vulnerable—solved!
Not really, of course. The widows and orphans that Microsoft Word cares about are found in a page layout, not in your community. Typographically speaking, widows and orphans are bits of lonely text. An orphan can be two words looking isolated on the final line of a paragraph. A widow is the first or last line of a paragraph, separated from that paragraph and standing on its own at the top or bottom of a page.
It’s a pagination detail that Microsoft Word likes to solve. Just a touch of pre-programmed algorithm, and voilà! The widows are no longer stranded. The orphans are no longer alone.
If only social crises were so easy to solve. If only a pile of money, biased assumptions, and mercenary AI could be thrown at widows and orphans like a Microsoft Word program, so that the rest of us could be content in our apathy.
But the Bible doesn’t call us to care for widows and orphans—that is, for people whose health and homes, livelihoods and opportunities are insecure—through impersonal automations. We’re not called to care for immigrants by leaving them stranded in the grip of ICE. The prophets don’t rally us to care for prisoners by leaving them alone at the mercy of private corporations.
Microsoft Word gets one thing right: no one should be isolated from community.
The Bible calls us to do something about it.
Prayer: For the courage to be personally invested, we pray.
cross-posted with the UCC Daily Devotional
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