Merry Christmas 2014

Bishop John Shelby Spong has written a Christmas message to the readers of his weekly internet column (JohnShelbySpong.com), and he closed it with these words that I share with each of you on this Christmas Day 2014. It expresses the deepest of my wishes for those I love as well as for my church that is so much of part of me.

Bishop Spong writes:
. . . . “ On this Christmas day I send my wishes that you will find the sacred in the midst of the secular, the holy in the midst of the mundane and God in the presence of human love for that is what both Christianity and individual Christians call the “Incarnation.”

“Fear not. God is.

“Because I believe that this is so, the call of Christ to us this Christmas season and our mission as God’s church is not to make people more religious, but to free them to live more fully, to love more wastefully and to find the courage to dare to be the deepest fullest self that they can be. That is the vision that caused our ancestors in faith to postulate that on the night when Jesus was born a star shone in the East and angelic choruses’ sang to hillside shepherds more than 2000 years ago.”

I add my own wishes with the traditional words for this day, MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Loren Bullock
December 25, 2014