A Positively Poetic Priest

 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

 "Love came down at Christmas Love all lovely, Love divine; Love was born at Christmas; star and angels gave the sign" Christine Rossetti's poem is a lovely one. And the hymn is wonderful too. A lovely Christmas song for Advent. Christmas is actually not the first manifestation of divine love. Christmas is not even the first manifestation of divine love in a person. Adam was. However, divine love did come into being at Christmas as the baby Jesus. This is the love waited for something understandable and relatable and able to be proved, well, as long as you believe Jesus... God exists and is present. And yet. This is definitely not how we approach Christmas. My husband knows how difficult I am to watch Christmas movies with because any time a movie starts going into 'the true meaning of Christmas' and they don't talk about the salvation of the cosmos from sin and death through love manifest... which never happens, I will say, you're wrong! to the television

If I asked you all to imagine a green hill with a blue sky with some small white puffy clouds on it, how many of you would see the Microsoft Windows background screen which was so popular for decades? It is reportedly one of the most widely known photographs ever taken it is now titled Bliss, originally titled Bucolic Green Hills bought from National Geography photographer Charles O'Rear it depicts a green hill and blue sky with a few white clouds on it. It was taken on the Sonoma Napa county line in California in 1996. The hill was in a resting stage between different vintages of wine grapes at the time and the story goes, O'Rear was driving to visit his girlfriend after a storm earlier in the day and saw the scene at the perfect moment. He put it up on a photo sharing website from where Microsoft bought it to use as their Windows background image. It is somewhat ironic to me, in an age of technology as more and more of spend hours staring at screens that most of us have at so

 "Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation." wait... did I just hear what I think I heard? the scriptures say, be at peace while waiting??? well, that is easier said than done. If I think about all the waiting I have done in my life I can say that much of it has not been the most peaceful. Anticipatory excitement or anxiety usually get to me quickly. The theme for the second Sunday of Advent is peace. The word peace shows up in two different verses in our lectionary scriptures. Once in the Epistle, 2 Peter 3:14-15a, as we heard and also in the psalm, number 85, verse 8 "I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, * for he is speaking peace to his faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him." There are so many conflicts going on in the world. In the news a couple make the headlines in any week, yet still hundreds of conflict

 “We seldom admit the seductive comfort of hopelessness. It saves us from ambiguity. It has an answer for every question: "There's just no point."; Hope, on the other hand, is messy. If it might all work out, then we have things to do. We must weather the possibility of happiness.” This was written on the former Twitter, by The CryptoNaturalist last July. (July 22, 2022, Twitter) This quote spoke to me about the reason hopelessness seems so easy in the face of so much in our world that seems so hard. In order to have hope, we have to be willing to change whereas hopelessness gives us an easy out. In August of 2017, the United States experienced what some media outlets called "the Great American Eclipse." It was a total solar eclipse that spanned fourteen different states, with a partial eclipse being visible from parts of Canada to parts of South America. I was traveling that day and remember pulling off the highway into a shopping mall to catch a glimpse of the

I have had a reputation in my life for not sleeping. As a small child, I didn't sleep through the night and frequently kept my parents awake. As a kid at camp, not being a good sleeper, everyone thought that I just didn't sleep. Even through college and seminary, my friends joked that I must not be human because they had never seen me sleep. I have a hard time sleeping through noise, and people make a lot of noise. My husband continues this line of joking still today though he has managed to catch me asleep, though not often, because he falls asleep faster than I do and he can sleep through almost anything. In the Gospel passage this morning, we hear another parable from Jesus. And this one leaves us with a lot more questions instead of answers. In the stories and teachings before this parable in the arc of story from Matthew Jesus is on this theme of staying awake. Of course, we get to the parable of the bridesmaids and see all of them promptly fall asleep. Thankfully, I don&#