Merry (belated?) Christmas!

…Or is it belated? I mean, we actually have 10 more days of it!

Though Christmas brings a heightened contrast of both elation and sorrow, I hope you’re wresting at least a smidgen of joy out of yours. This is the time of year that always goes by too fast. Alex and I just checked off our 13th Christmas as parents. My, how the years fly by.

I haven’t been sharing much on the bloggy wog here. It’s been so difficult to log in here with all that’s been going on (‘tis a busy time of year for us clergyfolk). And in the new year, I plan to prioritize things a bit better in my life. But that’s neither here nor there…

Below, you’ll find a couple of my recent homilies (apologies for the audio on the Christmas Eve homily - it’s a bit echoey). I recently decided to start putting all of my homilies on my church’s Substack publication, so if you’d like to get notified when they’re posted, subscribe there. I plan on keeping this space more personal and not so ‘churchey’ (not that there’s anything wrong with ‘churchey.’)

I’ll be taking some time off with family for the next couple weeks. One of my goals is to get as far away from most screens as possible. But I’ll leave you with a short Christmas Season Blessing to hold you over…

A Blessing for the Turning Dark

May you find yourself defenseless
in the presence of holy mystery,
stripped of your theological and moral correctness
and your need to get the rest of Christmas right.

May the God who showed up as a screaming infant
in a dumpster fire of political chaos and family dysfunction
meet you in whatever maelstrom you're in—
not to fix it, 
or to fix you,
but to be born there anyway.

May God remove from you the burden
of having to manufacture your own wonder
and may God allow you instead to let wonder ambush you:
in the exhaustion, in the grief and untimely disasters
that gatecrash your forced festivity, 
in the way love keeps insisting
on taking up space in your actual life.

May you know that the light we're waiting for
doesn't arrive to explain away the darkness
but to companion you through it,
to sit with you in the depths of the longest night
until something new breaks open from within.

And may you trust that the incarnation
happening in your own flesh—
even in your own failure—
is and has always been enough
to make this turning of the year holy.

The Word became flesh.
And still does.
Right here.

Amen.

Homily | ⚰️ Dead to Begin With

Homily | 🎄 Christmas Eve

In Comfort & Joy,
Jonas