By Mark Hart
Luke 2:11-14
Don’t people appreciate how busy I am? Good grief, I have these committee meetings to go to and chair, I have to get these reports in by the end of the month, we’re learning a new computer system at work that’s just eating our lunch. That’s just at work. Don’t get me started about what’s going on in my family… All of this family drama, sides being drawn down political and religious lines. I am so ready for this election cycle to be DONE. Sometimes I want to check out so that I can just catch my breath and …. oh, what’s this, wait a minute … a birth announcement? I didn’t even know she was pregnant … Wow, what a nice piece of news… This is kind of refreshing. Actually this is good news. A reminder for me that the world, my work life, even my family doesn’t necessarily revolve around me. Oh, yeah, there is something else going on that is completely other than me of which I am somehow connected. What a nice jolt to my self-absorbed perspective. This new life that has come into a world with such chaos, this world of such real violence and dislocation couldn’t come at a better time. I was just minding my own business and I’ve been surprised by such joy. Who will this child grow up to become? How will this child fulfill his/her own life that is so beyond my wildest imagination? I need this good news. Thank you, Birth Announcement!
One of my favorite quotes is from Andrew Greeley:
It seems to me that in the last analysis there are only two choices: Macbeth’s contention that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing and Pierre Teilhard’s “something is afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.” Either there is plan and purpose—and that plan and purpose can best be expressed by the words “life” and “love”—or we live in a cruel, arbitrary, and deceptive cosmos in which our lives are a brief transition between two oblivions. The data are inconclusive as to these two choices, at least if we look at the data from a rational, scientific standpoint… I opt for hope, not as an irrational choice in the face of facts, but as a leap of faith in the goodness I have experienced in my life.”
Come, Lord Jesus!