Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah (though in the words of Bill Maher, someone has to be wrong…)!

About to take off with the family to a friends house for dinner and festivities. It’s cold, damp, and grey in CT. Hopefully Lake Placid will be more of a winter wonderland come Tuesday.

Thank G-d we won’t have to hear about the bullshit War on Christmas for another eleven months, Bill. Lord knows that’s gift enough for many of us on this day. Christmas came. The world didn’t stop spinning. No one was offended, no one was denied.

Kid Oakland has a great post about the rhymey reason for the season. Check out the whole thing as a quote liberally below.

He preferred their company, their stories, their lives, their environs, their plight and their faith.

And they loved him. Because he touched them. He looked them in the eye and believed in them. Because, at the end of the day, when they looked to him they saw that his commitment to them was a commitment unsullied by qualifier or clause. It was a commitment to love them, even upon pain of death. They saw in him a love that promised to love them as they were and who they were…fully, without judgment or flinching glance, or hypocritical accomodation.

This man, Jesus, was surrounded by friends and disciples whom he mentored….not by carping or enforcing rules…but by example and teaching. By the force of his actions. By his resolute commitment to the least, the smallest, the most in need.
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And when the gospels tell of Jesus and his parables…the hidden story, that no one ever talks about…is that those parables…those words…would not live today without the work of the people who heard them..those little people who kept those words alive by absorbing them and remembering them and repeating them each to each. Jesus, aside from writing with his finger in the sand, never wrote a thing.

At the end of the day…when folks want to put Christ back into Christmas…it is clear to me they mean a creche….or a plastic glow in the dark Jesus with a beard. They want to be able to say “Merry Christmas” on TV.

The Jesus I know is bent over washing the feet of a prostitute. He is visiting a widow. He is feeding the hungry. He has laid his hands on a leper. There are people today who, inspired by that man and those actions, will do such things this Christmas day.

At the end of the day…scholars tell us…the Jesus hidden inside the gospels…the real man…the enigma behind the man heralded as the “founder of Christianity”…is actually the source of those words and actions that most grass roots Christians cherish to this day: The Lord’s prayer. The beatitudes. The parables. A number of sayings about poverty and wealth and faith and trust…and numerous accounts of healings and encounters with the poor and the outcast.

That, at the end of the day, is all we know of the historical Jesus. That, and the fact that he was killed by the Roman authorities some time a little less than 2000 years ago.

I long for a day when faith, morals, religious values, and humanitarian ethics exist in politics as a positive force. Not a rejection of progress. Not a call to fear. Not a barrier to compassion. But instead a genuine source of righteousness in common with those acting to improve the lot of all our America’s citizens. I will welcome religion into politics when it is there to bring hope, care, and dignity to the governmental process. I don’t see that happening before most religious talking heads take a refresher course on the values of the men they claim to speak for.

Until then…happy holidays.