Andy's Blog: A Personal Word

December 2008 Archive

December 30, 2008

Dec. 30, 2008

A story from our Christmas season: Mac and Burkely are the young children of Haley Smith, our Communications Director. They along with many of you attended our “Night in Bethlehem.” As part of the event, they were given some Roman coins to spend in Bethlehem, and with which to pay taxes.  When they got to the live nativity and saw the baby Jesus, they said to their mom, “We have a coin left, can we give it to the baby Jesus?” That one story made the whole event worth all the time and effort! They got it!

You got it too! During this Christmas season, Trinity provided Christmas for 240 children through the Festival of Three Kings. One couple took three children to buy gifts for rather than give gifts to each other. We are the largest single contributor in this program. In addition, you contributed more than $37,000 to the Christmas Gift of Joy, which provides for outreach ministries such as Church of the Reconciler, the Methodist Children’s Home, etc. The total for both of these “second mile” offerings for others was more than $61,000. 

What more fit way to celebrate this season when Christ, “though he was in the form of God...emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness.” (Philippians 2:6) Following Jesus, Trinity is a servant church.

Thank you for responding to God’s gift to us, by your giving to others.

December 9, 2008

Dec. 9, 2008

One of my favorite old masters is the Dutch artist Pieter Brueghel. His works are earthly and unsentimental, often filled with people from ordinary life. In his painting “Numbering in Bethelehem,” he sets the scene in a very ordinary Flemish village with a winter snow falling on all sorts of ordinary people. People are going about their daily lives. From one corner, a woodsman carries a load of firewood.  Little Dutch children are playing on a frozen pond. A woman is baking bread. In front of the village inn, a crowd has gathered around a bored looking bureaucrat who haggles with a taxpayer. It’s all very ordinary. The only thing that lets us know that there might be more going on here is a Christmas wreath hanging over the inn door – enough to make us look more closely. And that’s when you spot them in the lower part of the painting. A very ordinary young woman rides into town on the back of an ordinary donkey, being led by an ordinary peasant. 

There is nothing subtle about our celebration of Christmas. It tends to be gaudy and loud, covered with tinsel and accompanied by trumpets. All this is well and good, but let us not miss the point: that God’s love comes to us in ordinary ways as we open ourselves to see, hear and live that love. In the words of the carol, “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.”

As you go throughout this season, take some time to look deeply into those ordinary ways God comes to you.

December 2, 2008

Dec. 2, 2008

As a child, I remember how hard it was to fall asleep on Christmas Eve. Santa was coming. The anticipation and the excitement were just too much. I would lay awake in my bed, staring into the darkness, listening for sounds of sleigh bells or a sled landing on my roof. Finally my mother would tell me, “Santa can’t come if you are not asleep.”

It was one of those rare occasion when my mother was wrong. One of the central themes of Advent is to wake up! The Gospel for the first Sunday in Advent comes from the section of Mark where Jesus is talking about the second advent. He concludes by saying, “Keep wake, for you do not know when the master of the house is coming – or else he may find you asleep when he comes…What I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

To experience the meaning of “God with us,” we have to wake up and pay attention.  C. S. Lewis in Letter to Malcolm writes:
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God.  The world is crowded with God. God walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake.  Still more, to remain awake.”

Advent prepares us to not only celebrate what happened in Bethlehem long ago, but to grow in our awareness of God’s presence in this moment. It is an invitation to see God at work in the ordinary. 

This year our Mission Teams decided to stretch and take more children for our Angel Tree than we have ever done before. By the end of the early service on the second Sunday the tree was up, all 240 names had been taken – and people were asking for more. Just one instance of God coming among us! 

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