Christmas 2023
Dear St. John’s Community,
The season of Christmas is a marker like no other in our shared life. By the time Christmas Day dawns for us here in North America, people around the world will have held religious services and family gatherings, parties and celebrations, spoken in countless languages and marked by a wondrous array of cultural traditions. The Christmas season is a world-wide inbreaking of hope and light, made especially poignant for us in the northern hemisphere by its proximity to the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. Christmas comes to bring light into our darkness every year.
While Christmas marks our shared life, our lives mark Christmas. The Christmas we celebrate is marked by the life changes we experience in the year prior. In the Cole home, we have been looking at videos of Christmas past when Theo and Zachary were experiencing it for the first time. Those were wondrous and joyful Christmas celebrations, marking a “before time” for Sage and me forever changed when, from the unknown we all come from before conception and birth, these two beautiful boys entered our lives. As I look to the horizon of this coming Christmas, I am reflecting on it being the first without my Mother in the world, the first Christmas where all my grandparents and now both my parents have crossed over into the unknown we go to at death. There is a sadness in this reflection, but with that sadness a hope in the mystery that is Christmas. The mystery of Christmas is God entering our world from we know not where and manifesting in our darkness Christ’s love and light. In that mystery, my loved ones are parted from me but not from God, and in God, love still binds us together even when I see them no longer.
I wonder what life changes have marked your Christmas across the years. I wonder what in your life has changed this past year that will mark the coming Christmas season. I wonder who has come into your life bringing surprise and wonder. I wonder who has moved on, leaving sadness but maybe also a hope that, in the end, God’s love holds us all together.
At St. John’s, we constantly experience comings and goings, some long expected, some unexpected. In those comings and goings, there is a center in this place that holds us as we come and go, a center in Christ that manifests when we care for one another, when we care for those around us, when we care for those around the world, and importantly when we care for ourselves. St. John’s is a center we come to for spiritual sustenance, for inspiration, for beauty, for healing, for blessing that we might go forth as a blessing to others. That is how Christ comes to us, to bless us that we might be a blessing to those we meet along our way, from one Christmas to the next.
Each Christmas season here at St. John’s, we share a financial appeal. This year, we reach out to ask your help to end 2023 well and set us up for an abundant 2024. Our financial life in the aftermath of the COVID 19 pandemic is challenging, but there are signs of hope. We have new pledging households for the first time in a couple of years and an array of organizations and groups using our space and enriching our community. We are finishing up a robust round of capital improvements and gearing up for the next round.
For our 2023 Christmas Appeal, we ask that each pledging household make a gift of two weeks or half a month’s pledge. Some households will not be able to make such a gift, and we understand. We thank you for what you do give! Some households can and will give more, and we so appreciate your generosity! Those of you who do not pledge to St. John’s, your generous gift of any amount to our Christmas Appeal is most appreciated! Thank you! Please use the enclosed envelope to make your Christmas gift to St. John’s and bring it to any of the upcoming worship services through December 31 listed below, or mail it to the church at the address at the bottom of this letter before December 31.
By supporting one another through our support of St. John’s, we keep a marker in this community of Jamaica Plain and in our lives that Christ is always at the center, is always with us, blessing us that we might be a blessing to others. We keep the mark of Christmas manifest year round, even as we rejoice in this special annual celebration each December. We round our comings and goings, the unknowns we come from and the unknowns we go to, with the mark of God’s love made manifest in Christ at Christmas. And that love is forever! Thanks be to God!
With love and blessings,
Ted+