Processing with God: Narrative Lectionary, Liturgy, Prayers
What is Sacred, Christmas Prayer
God I approach this Christmas season with some trepidation, and a lot of fear and trembling.
Because I don’t know if I really understood before, what was really sacred, before now.
All the pomp and circumstance of Christmas lies by the wayside now, like crumpled wrapping paper.
After all, we are not here to impress anybody.
What is left, is the Christ Candle, burning the conviction into our hearts, that life is sacred, precisely because it is all so unique and beautiful and brief.
The fact that a young girl, a shepherd and a magi could each magnify God in their own, and yet important way makes me want to cry silent tears at the magnitude of the meaning of Christmas
So here we are…
Fill us up, with what Christmas means for each of this year
Reminding us that God sent a baby in a manger
for each and every one of us and God values us–
enough to send babies and angels and teachers and doctors and nurses and vaccines and masks
and phone calls and cards and candles and stars and every other symbol that we need to remind us
That we are beloved.
And that we are here to fill the world with love any way we can, because that is the Christmas miracle turning emptiness into something else.
Let us Go, and be comforted by the Love of God.
May God Bless you and Keep you
in Belovedness–
wrapped in the miracle that God is here.
Amen.
Always, forever, God is even now. Here. Alleluia. Amen.
Feel free to use/share/adapt with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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