Joy to the World: Seventh Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

It’s been warm here. While I actually enjoy wintry weather, and while I’m a big fan of long spells of seasonable temperatures that might indicate that our climate is still fundamentally stable, there is always joy in seeing new growth.

This is what I found in the patch of mint on the south side of our house: a little bit of green, a few new leaves growing among the dead stalks of last summer’s plants.

One of our Easter hymns, “Now the green blade riseth” (Hymn 204), is set to the tune of the Christmas carol Noel Nouvelet. The last verse is this:

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,

Thy touch can call us back to life again,

Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:

Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Here’s the King’s College Choir from Cambridge singing Noel Nouvelet:

Joy to the World: Sixth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

 During a conversation with my spiritual director this evening, I happened to look over at the window just as the sun was setting and saw this sky.  We were both amazed at the colors: red, purple, and blue. We wondered at the beauty of the sky; the joy was in the surprise of looking up at just the right moment to see such beauty, and in having another person with which to share it.

Joy to the World: Fifth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

Today was unusually warm for December 29 in Nebraska. Early this morning I thought I heard doves cooing, something I don’t hear most winter mornings, though the sound was so faint that I wasn’t sure that it was doves. Around 9:30 the sun got just high enough in the sky to really light up the room I was in, a definite moment of joy! I stepped outside to take a look at the sky and the sunlight, and noticed this pair sitting at the top of a spruce tree where doves often sat this summer and fall.

Later in the afternoon, while I was sitting at a window looking at the photos from the morning and writing, I saw a dove landing at the top of the same tree. It looked white in the sunlight, and landed in a way that made it look just like a dove ornament we used to have on our Christmas tree.  When I got outside to snap a picture, I heard it calling, and the second dove appeared. Double joy on the fifth day of Christmas!

Joy to the World: Fourth Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation.

The rivers in south central Nebraska are running freely as the year ends. I stopped today and listened to the sound of the river and watched the water flow. With the sun shining on it, this was a place to find joy.

Joy to the world! the Savior reigns; let us our songs employ,

While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy.

Holy Innocents: The Most Vulnerable

Today the church remembers the Holy Innocents, the children who died when Herod ordered the slaughter of all children who were two years old or younger (Matthew 2: 13-23)  .  According to Lesser Feasts and Fasts, Augustine of Hippo called these children “buds, killed by the frost of persecution the moment they showed themselves.”

As climate change takes its toll with extreme weather, flooding, famine, and the spread of tropical diseases, many children in our world have their lives cut very short, buds killed in this case by the frost of the world’s indifference the moment they showed themselves. MediaGlobal reports that children are the people most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, citing a recent Climate Vulnerability Monitor report that says that 99 per cent of climate change deaths occur in developing countries, and that of those deaths, over 80 per cent are children. Children are especially vulnerable to climate change because they are more vulnerable to malnutrition, cholera, diarrheal disease, dengue, and malaria.

Last summer, Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Program, said that the famine in East Africa was “the children’s famine” because “the ones who are the weakest are the children and those are the ones we're seeing are the least likely to make it.” This famine was caused by a severe drought and exacerbated by the political situation.   The U.S. estimated at the beginning of Augustof this year that 29,000 Somali children under the age of five had died in the past three months; at the same time the U.N. said that 640,000 Somali children were “acutely malnourished”.

The people with power in this world – the political leaders, the economically comfortable, the corporate heads – differ from Herod, of course. No one intends to cause the death of thousands of children; the objective is to maintain political power by not addressing a difficult problem, or to ignore the effects of climate change so that we can continue enjoying the sorts of comforts and conveniences to which we are accustomed, or to make a huge profit producing and selling carbon intensive energy resources or something dependent on them. Children are the collateral damage of our failure to address climate change, just as children are so often the collateral damage of wars.

But even Herod himself didn’t care one way or the other about the children who were slaughtered. His objective was to eliminate one child; the others were collateral damage to his cause. When we look the other way and refuse to acknowledge what is happening as a result of our failure to address climate change, we aren’t really all that different from Herod. And the grief of the mothers of today’s innocent victims is no different from the grief of the mothers of Bethlehem or the grief of Rachel.

Joy to the World: Third Day

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days of Christmas for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation. (See yesterday's post .)

Today I found ducks making a joyful noise on a partially frozen lake. There are usually plenty of mallards around this park in the winter. Today I was pleased to see a couple of wood ducks among them. The ducks were active today: flying, splashing, and swimming around, then resting on the ice along the open water. 

Joy to the World!

Let heaven and nature sing…

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: let earth receive her king;

Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

(Hymn 100)

The beautiful skies of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Nebraska echoed our joy in the celebration of the birth of Christ, the Incarnation of God come to live among us. The Christmas Eve sunset, the stars in a clear sky on Christmas Eve, and the abundant sunshine on Christmas Day gave us light during the darkest time of the year, helping us to understand John’s Gospel (John 1:5): “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

We Episcopalians celebrate Christmas for twelve days. With “Joy to the world” in my heart and mind, I’m looking each of these twelve days for the beauty and wonder in God’s world, for instances of the joy that runs through all of creation. During a walk today, I was surprised by a hawk that flew out of a nearby tree and glided on the steady southwest breeze.

Our Christmas Gospel from John (John 1:1-14) begins by articulating the connections among God’s creation of the world, Christ, life, and light:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

The wonders of the world around us not only help us stay connected to joy; they also remind us that God is God, the creator and sustainer of all that is in the entire universe.

He rules the world with truth and grace, and make the nations prove

The glories of his righteousness, and wonders of his love.