2008 Christmas Message from the Bishop

December 24, 2008

"...the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."

These familiar words of Philips Brooks's 19th century hymn, O Little Town of Bethlehem, may fall on the ear with a particular poignancy this Christmastide. As I write this in the first days of Advent, we have just learned of the terrorist attack on Mumbai, India. The continuing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere around the world describe a humanity deeply entrenched in violent conflict. The global economic recession, leaving people without jobs, homes, and food in numbers unimagined at this time last year, persists despite bailouts of considerable proportion. The earth continues to warm, and the future is rife with fears. For some, both here and abroad, this is also a time of renewed hope, notably for those who find encouragement in the leadership changes that come in an election year in the United States. Together we move forward in a period of great uncertainty, looking toward the unknowns that lie ahead with, perhaps at best, this mixture of emotions.

The unknown prompts both fear and hope. Elizabeth and her cousin Mary had to have experienced both of these in the months of their concurrent pregnancies. The shepherds, called to travel from field to stable to receive the gift of a savior, were doubtless filled with both. The virgin mother, when she pondered in her heart all that the shepherds had told her, and her faithful carpenter husband who had followed the dream angel's direction, must have likewise confronted both. Fear and hope reach from the unknown future either to draw us toward it or to drive us away.

Sometimes, even that for which we hope is fearful. Change, for instance, because it will require our letting go of the familiar and the treasured. The wellbeing of another, because it may well cost us some comfort or security of our own. Understanding, because it so often demands action.

The unknown into which we are moving now, and all that it will hold in terms of global economic markets, employment and unemployment, the abundance and scarcities of resources, and relationships among nations, tribes, religious communities, and all classes of people, beckons to us with both hope and fear. Hope for how we might respond as children of one God, siblings acting on behalf of one another and the earth we are given to share as a safe home for all, and fear either for what that might demand of us or for what might become of us should we not be up to the sacrifice, literally, the "making sacred".

For Christians, it is the incarnate God, the infant Christ, in whom, as Bishop Brooks so gently described, all our hopes and fears meet. It is in him that the hopes and fears of each generation, emanating from the unknowns that beckon every age, take on flesh and divine potential. It is the sacrifice of his birth that makes sacred humankind and offers us the possibility and the promise that we, too, can live on behalf of others as he lived, and give ourselves to the world with a radical vulnerability so dramatically articulated in a newborn child, whose primary capacity is to love.

It is important that we, the body of the risen Jesus, in preparing to celebrate again the Christ being born among and within us, understand the consequences and the challenge of that birth in our own living. It is important that we open ourselves to one another and to the world with his own vulnerability, to the end that the hopes and fears that meet in him will also meet in us, and lead us to love as he loves, heal as he heals, forgive as he forgives, and sacrifice, make sacred, as he sacrificed.

In the weeks and months that lie ahead, during which, either for good or for ill, we will move into the unknowns before us, we will continually be confronted with hopes and fears, with both of them vying for our obedience. It will be important that we remember how in Jesus neither is removed, rather they meet. Their meeting in him results in the new thing, the new response, the new life. At the Incarnation, the hopes and fears of all the years, past, present, and future, meet, and out of them comes the new life that we identify as holy.

Because they meet in Jesus, there is no hope without fear, and there is no fear without hope. If we are his, they will meet in us and lead us to new life, the life that loves, heals, forgives, and makes sacred. That is the new life in Christ.

May the journey through Advent and Christmas lead us again to the holiness that, through Jesus' life, is given to our own.

Gratefully,

The Rt. Rev. Mark Hollingsworth, Jr.
Bishop of Ohio