Candles This Christmas

I will light Candles this Christmas,

Candles of joy despite all the sadness,

Candles of hope where despair keeps watch,

Candles of courage for fears ever present,

Candles of peace for tempest-tossed days,

Candles of grace to ease heavy burdens,

Candles of love to inspire my living,

Candles that will burn all year long.

Howard Thurman, from "The Mood of Christmas"

Though his poem, "The Work of Christmas," is far more famous, this second poem, written around 1950, still speaks volumes of how we are all called to live the Christmas spirit the whole year through.

The grandson of a slave from Florida, Thurman studied non-violence with Gandhi in India and served as a professor and pastor around the country. His work, "Jesus and the Disinherited" is said to have had a profound impact on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a son of Thurman's classmate at Moorehouse.

Written in the tumultuous years leading up to the American Civil Rights Movement, the words still ring true as we face an unprecedented world today. Like Thurman's time, we are living in a society where remarkable, outspoken racism and xenophobia are considered acceptable and even preferential. Where once again people are judging who has the right to be saved. Who has the worth to be valued. And more often than not, it is not those who have always been listed as God's chosen ones.

The world would have us cast out the misfit, the other, and the foreign. They would have us cast down women and the people of color who have built so much of who we are. They would have us turn away as they not-so-quietly disappear people and intentionally denigrate those who refuse to fit the mold.

By contrast, God appears on the horizon as the helpless child of a scandalously-wed, Palestinian-Jewish, teenage (if not preteen) mother, whose own family will not take her family in. The child is visited by members of the lowest rung of society, next only to slaves, who have been sought out by God's own messengers, and then by learned foreigners. All this before having to flee to a foreign country for fear of a megolomaniac tyrant who slaughters children.

If we were to remove everyone who is offensive to the world we live in, there would be only an ox and an ass left in the famous nativity scene. And King Herod lurking in the wings.

But our God has always intentionally chosen the last and the least. The outcast and the foreigner. The women, the people of color, the misfit, and the unwanted. Not only is this evident throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, but Jesus, God's own self-made-flesh tangibly and consistently followed suit.

And that Child grew up to be One who would call us to do the same - to live out God's love with tenacious solidarity in our own time. Those are the candles we light at Christmas. Ones that do not diminish our own light, but make the entire world all the brighter.

Blessings,

Rev. Janie