The Kingdom of Night (written in the night on the solstice)

Today the world did not end.  Today the sky did not open and unleash a terror reign of judgment.  There were no raging armies loosed from heaven.  There were no horsemen unleashed.

But there was death.  Death that hangs like a cloud over hearts as they say goodbye. Goodbye to the twenty gunned down in Newton.  Goodbye to the grandfather, dead before his time.  Goodbye to the sisters fighting polio in Pakistan.  Goodbye to the children lost to dysentery, lost to suicide bombers, lost to drone strikes guided by a man sitting at a desk thousands of miles away.

There is way too much longing for apocalypse, especially among fellow Christians.  Too much longing for Jesus to come back as an avenger, a lawman, a hanging judge, and destroy all “those” who have not submitted to him. To much longing for God to reveal his true self as one of us: angry and deadly to his enemies, meek and mild to his friends.

Where does this come from, and where does it lead?  I can hate along with any human; I understand the deep desire to punish those who would hurt, especially those who would hurt the broken, the poor, the vulnerable, the young.  But I don’t understand how the Jesus I know—born to a refugee family in a barn, friend of everyone the world hated, the one who show us that God is love—how did he so quickly become the god of destruction?  Especially to those whose “crime” is that they were born to a Muslim household, or grew up in a remote village in China, or who were abused by the church as a child, and would not worship that God.

We have turned justice into punishment, so that we have little justice.

We have made revenge into a kind of holy rite, and so have been deadened to see how vengeance makes us perpetrators.

We have soldered God to an iron hymn of hate, and wonder why God does not come when we call.

And yet…

And yet…

There will be fires lit tonight, in backyards, and especially in the backyards of humble hearts.

There will be songs sung tonight, by choirs of angels, and choirs of beasts.

There will be soup and bread and cake devoured tonight, with gratitude and willful abundance.

 
Tonight my daughter Natasha will play a rabbit in La Natividad for the last time this year.  She works tomorrow, helping children who need a warm place to play basketball during the long nights in December Minnesota.
 
Tonight, musicians from Chile will sing songs of struggle and joy to a full house of warming pilgrims.

Tonight, a child will be born—many children will be born—in pain and in joy, in sweat and in blood, in hospitals and birthing centers, in little houses on the edge of little towns at the edge of the world, and yes, probably in a stable—and each of those children deserves our love, our protection, our hope and our joy as does the child born, born, born in Bethlehem. (And there probably will be a child born in today’s Bethlehem, born to a Muslim mother or a Christian father, born under the wall of separation, born to a fierce hope of freedom and peace.)

Today, we said goodbye to Ralph, a dear and generous man of our church, who died way too young.  But on this longest night in the northern hemisphere, I shout: Ralph lives!  He lives in the hearts of those who mourn him, he lives in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, he lives in the swaddling arms of the God who is nothing if not love. Love. Love. Love.

Be justice. Be beauty. Be love.

Patrick