Tomorrow, January 6, is the Feast of the Epiphany, the day the church remembers the revelation of Jesus as God Incarnate, and the homage paid the infant Jesus by the Magi. In this concluding reflection in our Advent and Christmastide series, Bobby Gross helps us reflect on the significance of the day, the season which […]
Devotional
Christmas Reflection: Incarnation: Grasping Glory
How could the Eternal do a temporal act, The Infinite become a finite fact? So asks W. H. Auden in his long poem “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.”[i] And there is no end of poems over the centuries plumbing the mystery of the Incarnation, the mind-bending paradox of God becoming human: Immensity cloistered […]
Advent Reflection Four: Letting Go: May It Be So, Lord
We lament our broken world and all that is wrong. Even so, we try to appreciate the moments that bring us laughter and joy. We say we long for more of God in our lives and in our world. But God has a way of coming into our experience in unexpected and life-disrupting fashion. Are […]
Advent Reflection Three: Laughter: Bring Us Home with Joy!
Psalm 126 opens with a memory of fortunes restored: “We were like those who dream. Then our mouths were filled with laughter, and our tongues with shouts of joy” and closes with an echo of longing: “May those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, come home with shouts of joy, carrying their […]
Advent Reflection Two: Longing: Come Lord Jesus
We rightly peered into the darkness, with lament, in our first Advent reflection. It can be hard sometimes to have hope. We are tempted toward anxiety and fear, for ourselves and for our world. Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson states flatly: “First, contemporary America is full of fear. And second, fear is not a Christian […]