THIS IS THE MOST ENJOYABLE Christmas I think I've ever had. No present getting or giving, no decorating, no traveling. I will miss our annual family party but we always had that on New Years because we had several family members who had jobs that had them on duty on the 25th. It was easier for them to get January 1st off. But the Covid resurgence and the certain presence of unvaccinated children under five has led to it being called off for this year.
Speaking of presents. I'm happy to be able to say that all of us who are eligible for full vaccination with boosters are fully boosted. I hope by next year even the babies will be protected to the best of the medical profession's ability to do that. They and the First Responders who have done a really wonderful job of delivering the vaccines here are a whopping huge present. Two out of the three were given to me by fireman-paramedics under the York County Emergency Management Agency, an entity I don't think I ever thought about for a single second in more than sixty years. That was worth all of the Christmas presents I've ever had in my entire life, including the few useful ones for which I am still thankful. My parents, especially my mother's gift of respecting well done medical science and making sure we were as fully immunized as possible is as much a part of that as the actual inoculations this year. A legacy still giving so many years after their deaths. I don't think we're anywhere near out of this but for now, what we know now, I'm enormously grateful for all of that.
In place of the store bought presents and decoration is a concentration on why such a holiday matters and that reason is the person of Jesus and his ministry and the nature of the glad tidings his extension of the Law and Prophets both into the wider world and in expanded meaning, freeing us from the bondage to the imagined rule of blind, indifferent, fate. There would be nothing to celebrate otherwise.
I've mentioned that I've left behind meditating on my breath and on the physical sensation of taking footsteps for meditating on passages of Scripture, especially this year, the sentences and phrases that make up the "Lord's prayer". I remember when I was young noticing that the prayer didn't seem to carry much in the way of the cargo cult conception of praying for stuff and the obvious request like that in it wasn't a frivolous request, "Give us this day our daily bread." Given our abundantly fed habit of praying for loads of stuff or the money to buy it with or the ability to get it, that's a rather modest request, to us, though one which is certainly the most desperately made one, the need for food to get through the day when you don't have it.
But I think the prayer does have some incredibly ambitious requests.
"Your kingdom come, your will be done," is one which, as a life-long anti-monarchist always made me feel uneasy about asking that. But the problem with monarchy - which, as I've noted God lays out quite well in `1 Samuel 8 - in human understanding is a problem of humans as kings. Human governance is bound to be only as good but still highly imperfect as the ones who govern. Having God as king would certainly not produce the same kind of government, we couldn't even begin to imagine what that would be like, all of our frame of reference being human rulers. The idea of God ruling us is thinking about something none of us has even a vaguely relevant idea of. It is a request for perfect governance, perfect and equal justice, perfect guidance, perfect in every way. That's quite a thing to ask for.
Think of that two-part request again "They Kingdom come, thy will be done." I used to think of God's will being done as if it was a passive acquiescent acceptance of whatever we got, assuming that what we got was the will of God, that it was a request for passive acceptance of that. But that's not what I think now, I think it's a request that God's will be done by us because I don't think it makes any sense to think that would happen "on Earth as it is in heaven," in our frame of reference by any other means. It's a request for the grace to do what's right strong enough to convince us or compel us or get us to do that so as to make life into a new Eden, this time us not falling into temptation and into the evil that the later theories of atonement theologically fit in with theories about the crucifixion of Jesus. Going back to what I said above, just getting allegedly educated Americans to get vaccinated so their unvaccinated Covid-ridden selves won't destroy the medical system and get other people killed shows just how ambitious a request that is.
The prayer that Jesus gives us in Luke and Matthew would be a great gift even if it was imperfectly realized in life. Worth anything I've ever gotten for Christmas, worth more than all of what anyone's going to unwrap today put together. The idea of it, the idea that it is a possibility has done a lot to make me happier even in my pessimistic expectations of what human evil and human folly and stupidity get us for governance and human behavior, now. Even if I never see it much happen in my lifetime, the idea that it might be possible or even that the less ambitious results of the triad of fidelity that Walter Brueggemann talked about in the lecture I've been transcribing for us might be possible. A gift card from Amazon wouldn't do for me what just thinking about that does.
Maybe I'll write about "forgive us our wrongs as we forgive those who wrong us," during Lent. Though, as it's tied to us forgiving those who wrong us, the size of that request should be even clearer. But it's Christmas so for now I'll let you meditate on that as you will.
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