GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST AND PEACE ON EARTH

Along with the majority of Christians I believe that God became human to save us.  God saved us by becoming like us — the all-powerful Word of God, the Word that created the universe and us within it, took on human nature so that we humans might participate in God’s nature (2 Peter 1:4). Or to quote one of the theologians of the Early Church, “God became man so that man might become god.”

In other words, our salvation isn’t simply found in the several hours of Jesus dying on the cross. Rather, our salvation is found in the entire event of the Incarnation — from the angel Gabriel’s annunciation to the young Mary, through Jesus’ entire life, his crucifixion, resurrection, and even beyond.

In all of these events, we discover the amazing reality of “God with us” (Immanuel).  That is our salvation.  Our salvation is that we have the chance to be communion with God, who has taken on our nature and dwells with us. We participate in God and God in us. And in that sharing of lives, we are being transformed into the likeness of Christ, who is not only the very image of God, but also the very image of humanity. Christ embodies the kind of humanity into which we are being saved. Through Jesus, God is recreating and renewing his image within us, within humanity.

While that is all certainly true, those are rather big words and concepts. Incarnation. Salvation. Redemption.  Renewal. They are just as big as the words for the 4 candles of Advent – Peace, Hope, Joy, and Love.

Let’s take all of this down a few notches.  Would you agree with me that our world is a mess. The world that we created and which fruits we reap and which pleasures we enjoy?  So we are not just passive bystanders of a mess that others create, but we are participants and perpetrators of the mess.  It won’t help to do what we so often do when something went wrong – point the finger onto someone else.  It wasn’t me. She made me do it. That’s what Adam did in the Garden of Eden.  That’s what we so when things go wrong.

In reality, though. We are not innocent.  We cheat, we lie, we take advantage of others. We use others to our own benefit. We put on a false façade. A nice appearance. Behind that façade, though, we often are not so nice.

Christmas is a reminder that we are created for something better. We are created in God’s image and God wants us to act in ways that honor the divine origin within each other. 

Those are really big words again.  Big words and big steps.  Let’s break this down into some really small baby steps.

Let’s take for example all the things that make up Christmas for us. 

For our purposes here, let’s just cut this list down to a few essentials.  While that’s a lot less, it certainly is still a lot.

Do you think that these capture the essence of Jesus’ life?  Hmm.  Now, what if we were to change the items a bit.

I do think that if we begin with baby steps, if we begin with admitting the mess in our own lives and ask for forgiveness, God’s forgiveness, and if we focus our actions just a bit more onto the needs of others rather than our own needs, we WILL capture more of the meaning of Christ’s birth, than if we were to stick to our original Christmas to-do-list.

I encourage each and every one of you to pick a few items from this list and begin God’s love, God’s generosity, God’s compassion, and God’s mercy in the here and now.  This Christmas and throughout the year.

And may the peace that is beyond all our understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Jesus Christ.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!

ACCOMPANING THE PEOPLE OF EL SALVADOR

Over the last five decades, the imagery used to describe missionaries has profoundly changed. Whereas missionaries used to be commissioned to “take” the gospel to every corner, missionaries today are called to discover God’s presence and revelation where it is already present in other regions and cultures of the world and to help nurture, grow, and refine those sprouts.  In other words, borrowing images from Jesus’ parables, missionaries have changed from pearl merchants into treasure hunters.

Memorial Wall with 40,000 Names and the Images of the 4 Church Women 

This change of understanding guided the journey to El Salvador that I recently undertook, just after Thanksgiving.  I had signed up to join a delegation jointly sponsored by SHARE Foundation (www.share-elsalvador.org) and by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (www.lcwr.org), that is, by the association of leaders of 80 percent of U.S. Roman Catholic nuns.

Tomb of Bp. Oscar Romero at the Cathedral in San Sanvador

Based at a simple hotel in the capital, San Salvador, for one week I crisscrossed the country in the company of some 115 others (about 100 of them nuns), traveling to many rural and urban places in three beat-up yellow U.S. school buses. The majority of our meals included rice, beans, plantains, pupusas, and many delicious fresh fruit, such as papayas, pineapple, and bananas.

Garden at teh University of Central America (UCA) with Images of the Six Slain Jesuits and 2 House Keepers

The occasion and timing of the delegation was not a happy one. It marked the 35^th anniversary of the brutal killing of four Catholic churchwomen (three sisters, one young lay missionary).  On December 2, 1980, these four “Gringa” women paid the ultimate price in service to God and their Salvadoran brothers and sisters when they joined the ranks of the about 80,000 people murdered or “disappeared” during the civil war that lasted from 1980-1992. Two of the women were buried in El Salvador, 2 were flown home to be buried in the US.

In San Pedro Nonualco, Gathering around the Shrine Built in Memory of the 4 Church Women

I learned on this delegation a multitude of facts that I had not known previously and heard many first-hand stories about massacres, repatriations, and murdered or missing family members – too many stories to tell in this format.  What stayed with me most clearly, though, was that those commissioned to positions of Christian leadership (as lay leaders, catechists, nuns, priests, or bishops) clearly saw the face of Christ present among the poor, beaten down, abused men, women, and children whom they served. 

Tombs of Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke & Ita Ford, Cemetery in Chalatenango

The sisters did not so much go to Central America to take the Gospel of Christ to the poor peasants and refugees with whom they worked.  Rather, in Central America they encountered Christ where he was already present: in the bereaved, hunted, anguished faces of widows and orphans holding up photos of their missing husbands and fathers, in the hungry refugees in need of food and shelter, and in the brutalized bodies thrown out of jeeps and left by the roadside.  They did not take Christ to them.  Christ was already there.  Christ was present and beckoned the “haves” to join him among the “have-nots.”

Walking toward Mass in a Town in Chalatenango District

Having entered into relationships with human beings suffering unimaginable violence (unimaginable for the vast majority of U.S. citizens), they began to look at the world from below, from the vantage point of the poor. And there, among that suffering people, they were finding Jesus — accompanying the victims, the massacred, the tortured, the families who had found the bodies of their loved ones lying along roadsides. Like the Good Samaritan, they could not just walk by; they stopped to care for the wounded and to see to their healing. But they also knew the suffering would not end unless the root causes were addressed — the injustice and repression of the Salvadoran military regime and its wealthy sponsors.

"...so that the blood of all martyrs may become the seed of liberation" (Mons. Oscar Romero)

To me, the witness of these four women is a testimony to the power of God to transform madness into hope. Most of all, though, it is a witness to the God who joined humanity in their lives by coming to them as a powerless child in a smelly stable.

Cross Designed from the Faces of Salvadoran Martyrs

I wish and pray that we at Bethel would be united in discovering Christ where he is already at work in the world.  Christmas was not only an event that happened 2,000 years ago.  Christmas, the incarnation of God in humankind, still happens in the here and now. More often than not, it happens among those who are as poor and powerless as Mary and Joseph were. May we have eyes to see God’s face, ears to hear God’s word, and hands ready to serve wherever God may lead us!

Mos. Oscar Arnulfo Romero and other Salvadoran Saints

Mural at the Airport in San Salvador & the Church where Mons Romero was Assassinated