GOD IS SO GOOD
Dear Friends in Christ:
One morning recently as I was making my way back to the Parish Office with a cup of coffee from Montana Mills, I found myself singing under my breath, "God is so good. God is so good. God is so good, he's so good to me." I'm not sure of all the things that set me to singing, there are so many. But I do know that all of a sudden I was aware of the incredible generosity of God to me and to this community of faith. We have all of us lived through some difficult times, but through them all God has been at work in us, teaching us about forgiveness and reconciliation, enlarging our hearts and our vision, and leading us into a future that is quite simply overflowing with possibility.
That is Good News indeed, the Good News that God is still present with us, has not abandoned us, that God is still - and will always be - Emmanuel, God with us. Every Advent and Christmas, I find myself drawn once again into the mystery and wonder of God's Incarnation. Even in the midst of all the craziness of what has been aptly called the "Christmas machine," I find myself blessed with moments of awareness of what Christ has done in taking human flesh and becoming one with us in our humanity. God did not have to do that, but God chose to. God's life and our life are woven together - for now and for ever. Christ chose to share our humanity in order that we might share his divinity.
The awareness of that Good News has changed my heart in two ways. No matter how often I stumble and fall, I know myself to be beloved, to be alive in Christ. "Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven" is how Henry Francis Lyte put it in one of my favorite hymns. I am , by God's grace, in the words of a wonderful Roman Catholic priest, "a stranger to self-hatred."
But if I am beloved, so are all those others whose humanity Christ took, all those others for whom Christ died upon the Cross. The Good News of the Incarnation calls me to look at others in a new way, to see them as God sees them. That is often very hard for me to do, for there are people in this world that I simply don't like, people whose actions I find unacceptable, and I'm sure that at least some of the time what I find unacceptable, God finds unacceptable as well. But our unacceptable actions - our sin - doesn't keep God from loving us, and it shouldn't keep us from loving one another. The Good News of the Incarnation pushes me to make the circle of my love larger, to include it that circle all sorts of people, from the person who cut me off in traffic to the suicide bomber in Israel, all sorts of people. And that Good News calls me to make my love real in praying for those who might be called my enemies, to pray that God would bless them and melt their hearts just as he has melted mine.
May we all in the midst of the business of the season be given the grace to see the signs of God's goodness all around us.
Your brother and priest,
Daniel
