God is here for you

 When I think of lights shining in the darkness that cannot be overcome,

I always think of starlight.
Stars are huge burning balls of gaseous mixtures light-years away from us.
What we see is history written large in the night sky
and those stars are not overcome by the surrounding darkness of space
they continue to burn and blaze in relationship with the darkness.

The light of the stars unfortunately is hard to see these days because of light pollution.
With so many outdoor lights - and extremely bright ones with new LED lights
and plane lights up in the sky
It means its no longer easy to see starlight
to know the true starlight from all the rest of the light
Being able to see the swath of the Milky Way is gone in so many places.
We have seemingly disconnected ourselves from the rest of the galaxy with too much light
we drown out the starlight.

All too often we do this in many other ways in our lives.
We listen to so many voices, our families and friends, the newscasters, our favorite podcasters, the radio personalities
we drown out the voice inside of us, the voice of God in our lives

We see so many romantic comedy television shows and movies
we forget what real romance, what real love is
We are flooded with so much restaurants and fast food chains
we have replaced family meals with meals adjacent to our families
We know what the difference is there.

In the 2008 Pixar movie Wall-E, which is even more relevant today than it was when it came out in 2008 and it was pretty relevant then,
the humans on the space ark haven't experienced human connection or touch in multiple generations.
They were so taken care of by robots and technology that they had forgotten what it means to be human.

Today is Christmas Day, the feast of the Nativity.
The day when God becomes human
comes to earth to experience our sense of life and love and reality
God, the grounding of all existence, the true light and voice in this existence
comes to be with us in order to deliver a very simple message
one that we have a hard time hearing
God loves us
God loves us
God loves us

As we have grown and advanced in culture and technology and numbers
we consistently drown out all that God comes to us as
we drown out God's light with fake lights
as if there can't be bad things if there is no darkness
we drown out God's voice with the voices of hundreds of other people
afraid to listen to the one who might speak to our very souls
We drown out God's love with imperfect impersonations
thinking that if enough people follow us or like our pictures
we don't have to recognize that our hearts long for love in ways we don't understand
because we were created for God's love
and no human love is going to fill that space in our lives.
Only Through knowing that God loves us - personally, each and every one of us
God loves me and you and you and you -
can we know the true love we are created for.

Today is really a ridiculous day by human standards
both because of what we celebrate
and because of how we have mashed up our celebrations.
We have so crowded up our celebrations with festive gimmicks
that we cannot see the true light, cannot hear the true voice, cannot feel the true love.
We celebrate God becoming a little baby boy named Jesus
in the midst of oppression in Palestine two thousand years ago
A baby boy whose mission in this world was to give us a very simple message
God loves us.

Today in the midst of all your Christmas celebrations 
Take a moment, perhaps this moment,
Open your eyes, God's light is for you.
Open your ears, God is speaking to you.
Open your heart, God loves you.
This day, this baby, this celebration
is for you.

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