Blue Christmas meditation 2017

Blue Christmas meditation December 16, 2017 When we moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 2009, the senior warden of the church gave me a tour of the Coast. As we drove down Beach Blvd or Highway 90 which runs along the Gulf of Mexico, it was a rather barren landscape. Whole swaths or property were vacant or worse-- still had the remnants of buildings decimated by Hurricane Katrina. A few structures had been rebuilt at that point, but not many. And the senior warden, a life-long resident of Gulfport, talked to me about how he would sometimes get lost in Gulfport right after Katrina because all the street signs and most of the familiar landmarks were gone. It was a sad sight, and a sad story, as I prepared to begin my new life there among those people who were rebuilding their lives, their homes, their landscape, and their very world. But, then I noticed something else. The oak trees. They have oak trees much like we do here, with the lovely Spanish moss hanging off. Oaks that are a testament to strength, longevity, grace, and beauty. But there was something different about their oak trees. They were beaten and scarred. Some of them had weathered the storm surge and the beating of debris from Katrina and were still standing, albeit battered. Others, the senior warden told me, had fallen in the storm and couldn’t be saved. (Some of those had been left as a stump that a local artist made beautiful sculptures out of, but others were just gone) But still other oak trees, he said, had fallen on their sides with their massive roots exposed. And he and other people had gathered with their heavy machinery right after the storm, and they pushed those massive oak trees back upright, putting their roots back into the ground, and they prayed for the best. And many of those oak trees were thriving as we drove past and he pointed them out. Many of you are here at this service because you have lost someone or something, some important part of your life, and you are not feeling the joy of this holiday season. You may be here because your inner landscape feels like a wilderness, or you feel that you have become lost in your familiar life, where all the road signs and landmarks are gone or destroyed. It is where you are today, but it may not be where you will remain. And I am here to tell you today, that you are an oak of righteousness, that will be restored by God or by one of God’s messengers. It may not happen today, and it may not happen tomorrow. But you are not, nor will you be lost. God has not forgotten you. The reading from 1 Thessalonians today, which we didn’t read in the service tonight, has a line in it that I offer to you this night, to carry forward with you into the darkness like a light. “The one who calls you is faithful.” It is the heart of the gospel, and it this truth that will bear fruit in your life, if you will let it, in ways that you might never expect. Whatever it is that you are mourning, whatever it is that brings you here this night, may you imagine yourself like one of those mighty oak trees felled by Katrina, lying on its side. Now imagine God pushing you back upright to be living but changed, beaten but not broken, with your roots sunk firmly in the soil of God’s creation. Know that you are cherished by God, and that you will not be lost. For the one who calls you is faithful. Amen.