Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my extended family had a conversation about secret code words. I had read recently in the Wall Street Journal that families need to protect themselves from scam artists. With AI, those scam artists can even imitate a human voice that might trick one of your relatives over the phone. We had trouble agreeing on the word. And then one family member said that we should just never fall for a scam because we should never give someone money based on a phone conversation. However, my point is this: we have been trained and conditioned and warned to be skeptical and stay on guard lest someone trick us.
The season of Advent summons us into a miraculous story that sometimes just feels too good to be true. On a Judean hillside, angels sang to shepherds. Wise men from another country followed a star to Bethlehem. And a baby was born in a barn who would save the world. Sometimes we stand back and see it all as an idle tale. Who would fall for that? Even a perplexed Mary says, “How can this be?”
On Tuesday night at the dinner table, my 7-year-old granddaughter prayed, “Thank you, God, for all the many, many Christmas lights.” An hour later, I snuck into a pew in our very dark sanctuary, illuminated by several huge candelabras, and listened to cello and harpsichord play Vivaldi. In such moments, my mind ricochets away from the endless to-do lists and overwhelming problems of our world, and I find myself immersed in the mystery of light and song. At these exquisite moments, I soften and begin to savor the possibility that love did come to earth in human form.
As Rueben P. Job wrote, there are moments when “I can believe that God who made all that is became clothed in our human flesh so that we might become clothed in God.”
Grace and Peace,
Carla
