Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Edwards Church Community!
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” –Eccl. 3:1
As we move through our celebrations of Christmas and the coming New Year, I am more than ever struck by the way in which meaning comes to life in the dance between individual participants and their perception, on the one hand, and groups of individuals and their shared values and understandings, on the other. To the extent I value or believe in something, I will subordinate other things to it, I will sacrifice for it. How I make adjustments, even rearrange priorities under changing conditions, reveals how much I value one person, group, idea, or thing in relation to others. And how any group I belong to makes similar adjustments under changing circumstances will reveal what it values, what meaning it finds or makes along the way.
This year, for the first time in our history, Edwards Church (like many other congregations) opted to have our Christmas pageant online. We found a way to keep telling a story that is important to us through an event important to us, and in the interest of community health we adapted how to do it. Jim Stokes-Buckles recruited church school families to record scenes in their separate homes, Dan and Michelle Prindle directed the children’s choir, and Dan edited it all together to bring us a complete pageant. You can see it on the church web site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf9LEdZva_4&feature=youtu.be. The pageant begins at 17:48 into the service.
In this year’s incarnation of the Christmas story, the Word is made flesh and dwells among us in the retelling. It is both timeless and timely. All the main characters – Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the angels, the high kicking chorus of sheep and their shepherds – are there to bring the essence of the story to life. And it is “spoken” in the 2021 language of Edwards Church of Northampton. This is how the gospel lives, handed down from generation to generation, enacted inter-generationally. Our annual festival of Lessons and Carols plays a similar role, with an emphasis on music and scripture, and an appeal geared more to an older audience.
In 1960, I imagine most of the people who received my parents’ Christmas card (shown above) found it very faith and family centered, and it was. My Catholic parents immersed their children in their faith, hoping we might share it and carry it forward. I am sure they did not foresee one son becoming a UCC pastor and another a lay leader in his UU congregation, any more than they could foresee daughters belonging to Catholics for Choice, a non-profit organization of Roman Catholics who support family planning, safe, legal access to abortion, and science-based sex education. Of course, 1960 was also the year the FDA approved the first birth control pill, and Roe v. Wade was not decided until 1973, so the Christian churches had not yet had to evaluate and adapt to those developments in medical science or culture.
The constitution of the UCC “affirms the responsibility of the Church in each generation to make [the Christian] faith its own in reality of worship, in honesty of thought and expression, and in purity of heart before God.” This is the work of the church in every generation and every facet of its operation. Anything that is not about that should be focused on supporting it.
Since last March we have been engaged in individual and shared struggles to avoid the virus that causes COVID-19. Now we have reached a milestone in that struggle: vaccines have been authorized for emergency use and will eventually be rolled out to the general population. If all goes according to plan, by the middle of 2021 we could reach another milestone in our pandemic struggle – herd immunity as a nation.
I hope the year just ending will be remembered not only as the year of the coronavirus pandemic, but also as the year our nation started – however haltingly – to finally come to terms with the white supremacy virus, the racism pandemic. This is a challenge that we have tried to outgrow as a nation primarily through law and politics, but it is more a challenge of unlearning certain biases and having the courage to create the society our moral vision calls us to create. It is the ongoing dance of people in community with shared values.
Pete Seeger’s song “Turn, Turn, Turn” uses eight verses from Ecclesiates as its text and closes with the line: “A time of love, and a time of hate; a time of war, and a time of peace, I swear it’s not too late.” May 2021 be the year we achieve herd immunity in more than one sphere.
With blessing of hope, joy, peace, and love,
Michael
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