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The miracle of life is the true Christmas miracle... indeed each breath is a miracle, each moment when we are able to gaze at the stars and see their brilliance is a miracle. And love...that's the best miracle of all. This Christmas we wish you moments of love, laughter and light.
Finding the Light Within

Give the gift of Presence...

During this time of year, most of us are rushing around being busy getting presents and making plans. But what about the real presence? True presence is the real gift you can give to your family and friends. Can you look into their eyes and express your gratitude for them? Can you see your family and friends at their deeper spiritual level and acknowledge their inner divinity?

Presence comes from our heart, not from the outer world. We spend all this time and money trying to say, with the outer world, what we really want to say with the inner world which is I love you and I am so glad you are in my life. 

So, this year, when you gather, can you be grounded, real, and PRESENT? I assure you, this is the gift that will be most appreciated, most remembered, and the most contagious. As one lights their candle from another's candle, the first light does not go out. As we offer the present of presence, others reflect that light back and pass it on. 

And on and on it goes...

~Deshna

Light in the Midst of Darkness

Fred Plumer


Jesus entered the world in a dark time in human history, particularly for his own people, the Jews. I will not go into the gory details here but few of us can even begin to grasp how hopeless and dark the world must have seemed to those oppressed people. They were living under extraordinary conditions. Most of them had lost the titles to their family farms. Through brutal and unfair taxation they had become tenant farmers on the same land their families may have owned for centuries. They had to endure unfair and abusive behavior from the Roman Empire and its soldiers who enforced the restrictive laws of both the Romans and the Temple priests. They had to fear death constantly through execution or starvation. This must have seemed particularly unimaginable for people who believed their G-d was watching out for them.

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The Greatest Birth Story Ever Told?

Rev. Dawn Hutchings


Some have said that it was the most amazing birth story ever told. This birth narrative heralded the arrival of a child who was praised as the Son of God, the Saviour of the World who was said to be the personification of peace on earth; God incarnate; fully divine and fully human. Not everyone agrees that this is the most amazing birth story ever told. Among the ancients, some insisted that the story Alexander the Great’s birth was the greatest story every told.

Alexander the Great’s birth story is truly one of the greats. His was, after all the, son of a Queen and a god and a king. His mother, Olympias was a Queen, betrothed to Philip of Macedonia. The night before they were married, Queen Olympias dreamed that a thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire, whose divided flames dispersed themselves all around her, and then as if by magic they were extinguished. 

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Finding Meaning In Christmas

Eric Alexander


This Christmas holiday week I plan to slow down and reflect on the year that has passed. I will set time aside to find some peace, joy, focus, forgiveness, thankfulness, and renewal for my own soul before the next year begins. I want to take some extra time to just be, and breath, and feel gratitude and joy. The best present I may receive this year may simply be the opportunity to be present. And maybe in that presence I will more deeply experience the very presence and Spirit of my own divinity.

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Looking for a Christmas Miracle

Ian Lawton


Where do you look for miracles? The Christmas miracle is NOT so much that a baby was born in unusual circumstances 2000 years ago. Every new born baby is a miracle. The miracle is that once you see the world as a place full of possibility, hope turns up even in the most surprising places. Once you see the birth of hope in your own life, you can’t believe it took you so long to find it. It’s EVERYWHERE, inside and out.

There are two ways to think of miracles and Christmas; as if the miracles happened two thousand years ago, or as if the Christmas story points to miracles that happen ALL the time, all around you, if you have the inner clarity of vision to see it.

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Angels, Virgin Mothers, and the Power of Myth – Sermon Video

Rev. Roger Ray


We read the Christmas story this year in the midst of a year marked by Isil beheadings, CIA torture, abuse of police authority, largely along racial lines, and an ever growing gap between the workers and the super wealthy. The birth narrative says that God enters the world where the big messes remain unsolved. The gospel writers were not ignorant about where babies come from. It is not just modern Bible scholars and progressive thinkers who realize that the virgin birth accounts are not historical.

The gospel writers were familiar with myths of virgin births, divine parentage, and incarnation from the culture’s praises heaped up on the pharoses, kings, and generals of their age. So they took the titles and the stories usually used to prop up the reputation of violent, abusive, political figures and creatively “plagiarized” them into a different context. For Luke (1:26-38), the Divine enters the world of the poor, of political refugees, where there is manure on the ground and where people give birth in the back seat of a car with no working heater….because these things cannot be ignored or accepted as a permanent state of affairs.

WATCH HERE...

A Christmas Letter to my Community of Readers

John Shelby Spong


For some people this column is their only ecclesiastical community. They might be a single person or a lone family living in places like the Pan Handle of Texas, rural Mississippi or in the low country of South Carolina, who find themselves to be the only non-fundamentalist in a wide area. They do not dislike their neighbors, but they cannot identify with the kind of Christianity they encounter in those places. They write to tell me that this column keeps them religiously sane. They are made to feel like atheists in their own communities when they are in fact nothing but thinking Christians.

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The Everywhere God
Worship Materials: Christmastime/ Christmas Day 

William L. (Bill) Wallace


If we allowed ourselves to meet God everywhere, each day would become a Christmas.

Christmas is not so much a season of the year as a season of the human heart.

Christmas is the festival of the inner child ‑ the celebration of vulnerability and peace, of play and delight, of laughter and tears and of that wonder without which we are alienated from the mystery at the heart of life.

To reverence the child in each human heart is to reverence the Christ everywhere.

There is no temple on earth more expansive than the manger in the human heart.

Christmas is the feast of the child, a celebration of the child in the manger and the child in each of us.

Deeper than the incarnation lies the purple incandescence of the mystery.

Like the wise men of the Christmas story, if we search for the child we will find ‘that of God’.


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The Birth of Jesus 

John Shelby Spong


While Luke’s narrative, the most detailed account of the birth of Jesus, is lyrical and inspiring, in The Birth of Jesus, Spong persuasively demonstrates it is allegory. Layer by layer, Spong weighs every element of the New Testament stories against Old Testament legends building a convincing case. Spong’s 16 original essays step backward and forward through the scriptures demonstrating why each element was chosen by the early CE writers to establish Jesus’ lineage and divinity. It is a fascinating and persuasive journey and a remarkable illustration of Biblical scholarship.

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The Christmas Truce of 1914

Ed Taylor


Recently, as I was researching, I was reminded of the truce on the first Christmas of the First World War. Even though it was a series of unofficial cease fires, what happened in Belgium and at other battle sites along the Western Front is a great anti-war statement that illustrates the insanity and inhumanity of war.

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Anam Cara 

John O'Donohue


John O’Donohue, poet, philosopher, and scholar, guides you through the spiritual landscape of the Irish imagination. In Anam Cara, Gaelic for “soul friend,” the ancient teachings, stories, and blessings of Celtic wisdom provide such profound insights on the universal themes of friendship, solitude, love, and death.

“When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy; where before there was fear, now there is courage; where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness; where before you used to be jagged, now you are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning.” ~Anam Cara

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Be|Art|Now: Earl Lectures 2015 

a public conference for activists, artists, & progressive people of faith 
 

January 29-31, 2015

Be|Art|Now, the 112th Earl Lectures and Leadership Conference, brings you into conversation and reflection with theologians, artists, communities, and art itself. Guided outings will focus on the intersections between arts, spirit, and social change.

Featuring performances and lectures by artist-activists Adriene Thorne {pastor, dancer}, Michael Franti {poet, musician, composer}, Jinho “The Piper” Ferreira {playwright, musician, police officer}, and Tim Holmes {sculptor, philosopher}

Earl Lectures and Leadership Conference is a three-day conference that addresses critical theological, pastoral, and social issues of the day.

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Peia “Machi”

from the album Four Great Winds


This sacred music is absolutely ethereal and enchanting. With a voice like an angel, Peia takes us on a journey that is a meditation, a prayer and a celebration weaved into one.

This song speaks of healing power and medicine of Woman, the Moon and the Earth Herself. A Machi is a medicine woman and sometime also a medicine man. May the images here remind us all what a miracle this life is. May we see that though tender and vulnerable our Earth is wise and resilliant beyond all measure. “Where there is Love there is Life ” and here there is a lot of Love. Blessed Be.


WATCH AND LISTEN HERE
Blessings for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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