Mtr Paula Barker Datsko

Dear friends,

This is the season for celebrating the miracle of God coming to life in humankind. The awe of Christmas Eve is fresh in our memories; the wonder of that babe in the manger long ago. Today, Paul’s words can remind us of God’s desire to come to life in each of us as well.

We, dear friends, are people who have been baptized into Christ and marked as his own forever. The grace of God’s love surrounds us -- always, whether we feel it or not. This grace nudges us to recognize aspects of ourselves that resist God. Better yet, this grace empowers us to relinquish those things so that Christ may come to life ever more fully and freely in us.

Paul cites various dispositions and behaviors by which people alienate themselves from God and one another. What about you? Where does the resistance arise in your life? What habits of bitterness or wrath or wrangling prevent the lovingkindness of God in Christ from welling up in you and overflowing to others? What might you do today to shift that barrier a bit, to let the love of God come alive in a new way in you?

One of the first theologians, Irenaeus, elaborated on themes from Paul when he taught that God came to share in human life so that we might share in divine life. What Jesus is by nature – a divinized human – we may become by grace. This ancient teaching is reflected in the Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas: “… Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ….” (BCP, p. 214) Being united with him in baptism, being fed with him in communion, living faithfully together practicing the way of love: by these means of grace we are transformed.

This also is the season for resolutions about how we will live during the new year. I pray, dear friends, that each of us will be inspired to shed some fragment of our false selves. In the emptiness of that opening – in the stillness -- may divine love quicken and come to life. May we nurture this divine love in each other, growing together in Christ’s likeness. May this be our daily bread.

Mtr. Paula