Greetings, Diocese of Olympia.
I’m here in what will become our chapel space in Diocesan House. It’s the old library here in the mansion and something that has been under construction. When I first imagined doing a Christmas video for you, I was hoping to have a nice tree set up nearby and looking all perfect in this space and yet here we are, under construction.
Often we hear from our culture about how perfect Christmases can be. We get this in ads and in magazines and watching commercials. There’s those folks who are given Lexuses with car bows all wrapped up, and it feels as if everything has to be perfect. And yet, at least my own experience has been that Christmas sometimes is less than perfect.
Like the one from my childhood, which included the Milky, the Marvelous Milking Cow incident, or the time when I had bought a train table for my son Noah when he was little, and I hadn’t even set it up prior to Christmas Eve services and was wondering if I would get it all done. There was the Christmas that we ended up moving two days after Christmas on the 27th and thinking that we would have Chinese food for Christmas dinner, taking a page out of “A Christmas Story,” only to find that all of the Chinese restaurants near us were closed because they were Christian. And then there was one, even just two years ago, when I got COVID on the 22nd, as did two other members of my family, and I sat there on Christmas Eve in the study of the rectory watching people walk by going to services.
Christmas is often imperfect. But for me, that’s the real truth of this season because Jesus comes into the places of our lives which are unfinished. Jesus enters in not to a palace, but that stable. Coming to Bethlehem and lying there among the sheep and the cows and the donkey and being placed in a manger. Far too often, we think about the coming of Christmas as all the stuff that is perfect. And yet, Jesus meets us right where we are. And friends, that is the good news.
So as we celebrate these 12 days and as we gather with friends and loved ones, I hope that you remember that it doesn’t have to be perfect, that you don’t have to be perfect, but rather to allow Christ to enter into you again in a new way, in all of the messiness of life, so that you might truly experience hope and peace.
Wishing you and all those that you love, a very Merry Christmas. May God bless you during this time.
