...and nothing else

Many the gifts, many the people,
many the hearts that yearn to belong.
Let us be servants to one another,
making your kingdom come.
Christ, be our light! 
Shine in our hearts. Shine through the darkness.
Christ, be our light!
Shine in your church gathered today!
---Bernadette Farrell, 1993

The title of the 1979 memoir I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can always makes me think of that moment when someone has given 100 percent. "You take it from here, pardner," I hear them say, "I'm out." Or, <mic drop>...done. Elvis has left the building.

And I sometimes wonder if Jesus ever felt a bit of the pull of that tension---his time ticking away, knowing he'd need to count on his rag-tag band of followers to spread the word (that love was the way), knowing he was the Sun, but he'd be having to count on the Moon to reflect the shine in the world before too long. I wonder if Jesus felt like he was dancing as fast as he could.

The church lives in that tension too---never more so than here in the Advent season, when we await the great Already/NotYet: the shining of Light into our shadowy corners, the coming of Christ into our longing world. This verse of the modern folk hymn Christ, Be Our Light by Bernadette Farrell speaks to the divergence, and richness, of what we know, and acknowledge, and embrace. While we yearn for Christ to be our light in this world, to dawn on us, we yoke ourselves with Christ the Sun. As the church, we are the body of Christ in the world, reflecting light like the moon reflects the sun's.

If Christ is to shine in the shadowed corners, it will be through the light reflected by Christ's body, the church. It will be because we served one another. It will be because we welcomed each other. It will be because we nurtured and developed the gifts each brought to share.

If Christ is to shine in our world today, it will be because the church is devoted to the work of building the reign of Love, and nothing else.

...I sing you

I sing you,
with all my soul I sing you!
I seek to give my spirit wing
with each new day,
with rising song lift you 
for my ever.
I've found gladness in knowing 
your help is my sure footing,
your hope is my soaring,
maker of under and over,
the blue all around.
You are faithful:
you pursue justice for the innocent accused;
you fill hungry mouths by your provision.
You grant freedom to the bound,
clarity to the unseeing;
you carry the burden of the bent as if
it were you own;
you rain down love on those 
consumed with law, drown us in love.
You keep watch over the unnoticed;
you stand for the underserved and neglected,
you shake your head as the wicked 
bring about their own destruction.
The community you dream for us 
will be forever. 
I sing you.
---Psalm 146:1-2, 5-10 (para. laca)