Musings for the long Christmas weekend

The season isn't over -- and won't be until January 6, the epiphany (the showing) of the infant God/Human to the Three Kings. But we're through the great American consumption holiday and Northern European Saturnalia. Time to reflect ...

At Christmas in 1978, Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador, soon to be felled as a class traitor, preached the meaning of Christmas as he understood it to the very class which had him killed.

No one can celebrate
a genuine Christmas
without being truly poor.

The self-sufficient, the proud,
those who, because they have
everything, look down on others,
those who have no need
even of God — for them there
will be no Christmas.

Only the poor, the hungry,
those who need someone
to come on their behalf,
will have that someone.

That someone is God.
Emmanuel. God-with-us.
Without poverty of spirit
there can be no abundance of God.

 It's easy to imagine why some of Romero's hearers wanted him dead.

This morning in Zoom church, a friend told of taking food on Christmas Day to another friend who is living by the underside of a bridge. Food was nice, but it wasn't what the recipient most needed. That would have been a new tent, as the previous night's rain storm had destroyed the one he had been living in.

We may have the poor always with us; Christmas signifies we also have God-with-us. Kinda scary; totally wonderful.