Sunday Prayers December 20th, 2020
Christmas is coming edition
Dear God,
I understand that Christmas is next week, and that we are in a time of “preparing” for that. Usually that means shopping and mid-week vespers and holiday parties and making travel plans for family and watching on Sundays as children light Advent candles inside our festively decorated churches, and seeing the number on the Advent calendar grow each day.
But this year we don’t get to have much of that. This year we are isolated and watching the number of infections and deaths grow each day.
So preparing for Christmas is going to have to be an inside job this year, but I can’t do it alone. Alone I can only binge watch TV and eat my increasing weight in cookies. But I still have enough faith (barely) to believe that with you all things are possible.
So I’m asking for some help.
Help me let go of every bit of resentment I have about the things I have lost this year.
Help me forgive myself for not doing this pandemic as well as people on Instagram seem to have.
Help me not judge everyone who is taking COVID less seriously and more seriously than I am.
Help me not close my heart to the suffering of others.
Help me know when to reach out and be a lifeline to someone else.
Help me know when to grab for the lifeline someone else is sending me.
Come, Lord Jesus, be born again into this shit-show of a world and break open all of our hurting, brittle, devastated hearts like only a baby can do; then Marie Kondo them, get rid of the clutter and resentments and fears and everything that keeps out the joy that, despite everything we have lost, is still all around us.
I guess what I am saying is, we may need some help this year with that whole, let every heart prepare him room thing.
Amen.
Join me tonight for the 4th Sunday of Advent!
I love Advent.
And I miss church.
So I’m inviting everyone to join me at my kitchen table for a short Advent service each Sunday 8-8:15p EST. All are welcome. Not need to believe the same things I do.
Prayer, poem, mini-sermon, candle lighting and 2 verses of O Come Emmanuel sung by my friend Rachel Kurtz.
Grab your candles and join me on my Instagram Live. (Just go to my Instagram page and you’ll see my profile pic (circle at the top left with my photo) say “live” when I start. Just click and you’re in!
Christmas Eve Service From My Kitchen Table!
Join me and Rachel Kurtz for a very short Christmas Eve Service -
DEC 24TH, 8P EST - on my Instagram Live.
For what, where, and whom do the people of God pray?
Comments are open. (But don’t be an asshole.)
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2 things I loved this week:
The Happiest Season (Christmas special on Hulu)
This year particularly I am reminded that Jesus was not born whole out of Mary's head, like Athena out of the head of Zeus. He was born of a real, young, human woman as a small, vulnerable beginning, which reminds us that sometimes the Light we need is small and desperately in need of our protection. It is nearly all potential, wrapped in the most delicate of skins. And so we must tend it carefully, hold our hands around it and blow on it gently, like the tiniest flicker of flame in a rain-drenched forest.
Its weakness at the beginning is not a failing on our parts, as if we would have gotten a stronger, more self-sustaining gift if we had been more faithful. The gift of the baby Jesus is that God trusted us to care for and protect him, to build him up until his outer strength matched his inner Light, to teach us that this is a team effort, to show us that He also has faith in us.
Despite following all the Coronavirus guidelines, I got COVID19 because I had to keep working (in a grocery store - believe me, I applied for a lot of other jobs) and my wife got it, too. She is sicker than I am, despite me having higher risks. Can I ask for prayers for quick and complete healing, and a joyful Christmas despite this, my own personal shitshow?