Dear Ones,
Things are not the way we want them to be, are they? The struggles of so many— health, jobs, drugs, violence, political discord, tragedy in the Holy Land, the effects of climate change— everywhere we look, I see the need for God’s love to be made manifest, in real-time. It has ever been thus. The birth of Jesus was, and continues to be, the in-breaking of God’s right design into our broken yet beautiful creation.
Jesus is the primary reminder to us that God doesn’t give up on humanity. God infuses the sacred into the ordinary and the broken. Beauty and catastrophe are infused with God because God is not elsewhere— God is where we are.
In the coming days, we will gather to celebrate the birth of Jesus in homes, churches, gyms, and outside in God’s creation. As you do, I pray that you would bear witness to the light, hope, and love of Christ so that all would know God’s grace, truth, and glory.
May I remind us all that our gatherings and our witness are not meant to look like a picture-perfect Hallmark card. My prayer is that we would find Christ present in the glorious and the mundane, in the hymns and in the silence, in the celebrations and the grief. Emmanuel is born and God is with us through it all.
I wish you a blessed and holy Christmas.
Faithfully,
Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows
