Dear Friends,
CJ joins me in wishing you all a very merry Christmas and happy New Year.
Christmas is around the corner, and we look forward to welcoming many guests on Christmas Eve and Day. Let us pray that the Light of the World would touch our lives, and we would return to Christ and believe the good news of the gospel!
If, for whatever reason you cannot make a Christmas service, please remember that Christmastide is a season and not a day!
The first Sunday of Christmas, December 28, is also a festive time to tell the story of Christ’s birth in the service of Nine Lessons and Carols (10am).
In the first week of Christmas, CJ and I will be visiting our daughter Grace and son-in-law Al (and their new puppy Rook) in Maryland, and we look forward to that time together.
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Christmas is a time to celebrate the truth of John 1:5 “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
This Advent, I’ve been meditating on two countervailing realities, light and darkness.
The reality of darkness looms large in our world. One does not need to be particularly prone to brooding to sense darkness today.
On the world stage, just within the past week we witnessed the massacre of innocent Jews on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, and the deaths of two Brown University students (one of whom was known by a former parishioner, Stephanie Levert).
There is literal darkness in Ukraine where the people continue to suffer under relentless Russian aggression, through no fault of their own. I am very concerned that our policies will result in abandoning Ukraine to a future of permanent darkness unless the West comes to its senses.
Turning to our own land, there are the dark themes that press in on us from leaders ridiculing people, mocking them, or “othering” them, and this, too, is dispiriting and unhelpful.
And there is the darkness that comes from personal loneliness, frustration, illness, fear, or anxiety, and this darkness can settle over loved ones or us like a fog that moves through a water-soaked valley.
So, what am I asking for?
I’m not asking for people to bury their heads in the sands of sentimentality. We cannot put our fingers in our ears and say, “I can’t h e a r you!” over and over again.
What we need is to return to the gospel message that tells the story of Jesus, the Word of God, the Light of God, very God of very God, who was coming into the world to save the world from itself.
We need to dwell on John 1:14 –
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
And by dwelling in this way - meditating, marinating, luxuriating, inhabiting – we are transformed from the insight out. When believers yield to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit enables us to become Christ’s lights shining in the dark corners of the world.
In the time given to us, what can we do, living as we are as little lights in a darkened and stormy world?
To this, I turn to Edmund Burke, philosopher and statesman, seen by many as the founder of classical Anglo conservatism.
Writing in the late 18th century on the French revolution, Edmund Burke developed the concept of the “little platoon.” He remarked, “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle … of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind”.
What did he mean by the little platoon?
Burke pointed out that institutions such as churches, the family, pubs, and local communities – even Scouting groups or Rotary Clubs (though those were not around in Burke’s day!) – served as mediating structures between the individual and the state. More importantly, it is in these “little platoons” that things like virtue, respect, decency, sacrifice, and honesty are grown organically. It is these little platoons that carry the water of a well-functioning society, and not the passions of ideology or political extremism. It is when the neighbor ceases to be a neighbor and instead becomes a caricature or a means to an end, that society breaks down and tribalism takes over.
The church is essential to shining the light and banishing the darkness.
It is time for the church to be the church, and to bear witness in and through the “little platoons” that we are, to the reality of the Light of the World.
Remember, the war has been won, Christ has the victory, but we are engaged in the battle, and our weapons are mercy, truth, and love.
Because of Christmas, we have hope that the light will not go out over the entire world!
Merry Christmas!
Fr. Chris