For many of us, instead of opening our hearts to prayer, Sunday school, or for Jewish children, Hebrew school,l can have the effect of silencing our natural instinct to prayer. It’s like the story of a simple shepherd, who every day would offer his personal prayer to God: “God, I love you so much, that if you were here, I would give you half of my sheep. If it was raining and you were cold, I would share my blanket with you.”

One day a great rabbi was walking by the field, and he heard the shepherd praying. He ran up to him, and said “Do you call that praying? Are you kidding? What would God do with your sheep? Of what use would a blanket be to God? Here, let me show you to pray properly before you further dishonor God’s holy name!” The rabbi then gave a brilliant lecture on the structure and meaning of the various prayers, and explained what to say and how to say it to the poor shepherd.

As soon as the rabbi left, the shepherd sat there stunned. He didn’t understand a word of it. But he knew the great rabbi was quite upset that his prayers were not proper. So he stopped praying.

For too many of us, that’s where the story ends. Fortunately for the shepherd, there is more to his story

Up in Heaven, God noticed the silence, and said “what happened to the beautiful prayers of my humble shepherd?” He decided to send an angel down to go and find out what was wrong. The angel found the shepherd, and the shepherd told him the whole story of his meeting with the rabbi. The angel said, “what does that rabbi know? Would you like to see how we pray in Heaven?” The shepherd instantly agreed and the angel whisked him off to Heaven, where he saw a Heavenly Host standing and proclaiming: “God, I love you so much, that if you were here, I would give you half of my sheep. If it was raining and you were cold, I would share my blanket with you.” The shepherd happily went back to his prayers, and God happily listened.

Now I must make a confession to you: I am that rabbi.

Professionally educated with way too many degrees, I am more comfortable lecturing than listening. I can be more comfortable leading in front than praying a humble prayer in the back. I need to learn from that shepherd. I sometimes let competency and knowledge blind me from the prayers and holiness right in front of me. Sometimes what I see and hear in the world may not fit my preconceived ideas, so I reject the shepherd’s prayer because it is not like mine.

But there is much more to this than my confession. In many respects the Episcopal Church is that rabbi as well. The world out there is the shepherd saying his humble prayer. The good news is that God listens to the prayers from the Episcopal Church AND God listens to the prayers of the humble shepherd.

How often do we look down upon other worship expressions because they are unusual? How often do we encounter prayer and worship that we reject because it doesn’t fit our preconceived ideas?

I am not suggesting that we have to reshape our practices of prayer and worship along the lines of other churches. Could we learn from the shepherd? Could we appeal to more people with an additional, simpler service?

The world is full of people who say they are “spiritual but not religious.” They want to pray like the shepherd without an educated priest or rabbi telling them how to pray. They already know the simple truth of what we have missed: The Lord is the shepherd.

The world has changed profoundly in this generation. Like the rabbi, our beloved church has been stuck doing the same thing for too long while the world passed us by. Maybe it is time for us to listen to our youth and listen to the world out there so we can learn how to be a church in this generation.

Maybe if we sit down and really listen to what they are saying, we can learn something from our children. Maybe.

It was a typical day for me. The main phone line to the church was broken. The Internet connection was down. I had a class to teach at Bacone at noon and just enough time to get to the hospital to see someone who was really concerned about her state of health. My cell phone was ringing and the telephone repair person showed up. He needed to have several doors unlocked and the upstairs attic stairs rolled out for him. After getting the repair guy set up, I locked the office door and started to walk to my car. A homeless man stopped me needing money to wash his clothes. I had only a single dollar bill in my pocket to give him, and I did not have enough time to go inside to check my office drawer for any cash. I spoke with the man for a couple of minutes, all the while distracted by the fact that I needed to be at the hospital. It was a terrible feeling of being rushed and not really being present for the person who was in immediate need. In retrospect, I thought of today’s gospel and how it is with the poor. When the person in need is standing right in front of you, it can change your plans and your priorities.

It is common to turn on the news today and hear all kinds of talk, one way or the other, about government programs for the poor. We hear name calling and language we would not apply to anyone in person, all used in reference to the poor. They are out there somewhere, not really human, just nameless faces who put a burden on taxpayers. Yes, some of us as physicians, judges, lawyers, and clergy work professionally with the poor. But how often do we actually stop our busy schedule and change our plans because of the needs of a poor person?

But that is exactly what happened to Jesus. “After sternly warning the leper he healed, Jesus sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘Say nothing to anyone. Take the offering for cleansing that Moses prescribed and present yourself to the priest. This will validate your healing to the people.’ But as soon as the man was out of earshot, he told everyone he met what had happened, spreading the news all over town. So Jesus kept to out-of-the-way places, no longer able to move freely in and out of the city. But people found him, and came from all over.”

Who can blame the poor leper? He must have been blown away by his healing. Yet the leper, who had formerly been forced to hide from society, is now freely able to interact in society. Meanwhile, Jesus is forced to withdraw from society. Some translations say that he kept to “desolate places.” Jesus and the leper trade places in terms of where they live and how they can interact with society. How many of us in helping the poor have been forced to change zip codes?

The very real, tangible aspect of God incarnate in Jesus is that God experiences human suffering the same as any of us. Without hesitating, Jesus heals this leper. The consequence is that Jesus is effectively banished from society. It is all well and good to talk about Jesus being fully human and fully divine. But when Mary proclaims that God has lifted up the lowly; God has lifted up the poor; God has set the prisoners free; this lofty ideal demands energy and commitment. It changes the plans Jesus made, and he suffers as a result.

We do not need to enter the politically charged fracas about “concern for the poor” or “safety nets.” We need to come to grips with the very simple, very direct demand that when a poor person or family is standing in front of you, it can change your plans for the day and it can change your life. This work is inconvenient. It is messy. We sometimes get scammed. But we must do it risking the scam, risking the inconvenience, and risking the possibility that we might be changed.

Following a set of rules is easy. You either follow them or you don’t. But we all know that real people seldom fit into easy categories. Following Jesus is not easy. It is messy. It is uncertain. Things don’t always work out the way we expect them. We will likely find surprises along the way both pleasant and unpleasant.

Last week I was invited to teach a class on ethics at Bacone College. Towards the end I gave a quick test about career priorities. There were six items on the list: Money, Advancement, Authority, Fame, Knowledge, and Integrity. I asked them to rank the top three items in priority order. Of course, integrity should be first on any list because without it nothing else matters. Of the college students, only one out of eleven ranked integrity in their top three.

There is an institutional equivalent to this test. We can be like some church bodies and hide behind a bunch of rules. We can proclaim that these are the Bible-based rules for you to get into heaven. Just follow these rules and you will be saved. You should know that we do not do this at Grace. At the other extreme though, do we get too wrapped up in tradition and doing things decently that we miss the poor people right in front of us?

I wonder if a church with integrity would really try to follow Jesus in everything. Would we allow our carefully planned days to be disrupted by someone else’s problems or praise?

We are called to follow Jesus. We are called to baptize more people than we bury. And we are called to share the teachings of Jesus with others. I think we will grow as we do these things. I think we will have fun. I just hope that we don’t get so busy that we miss the poor people right in front of us.

For several decades the Episcopal Church has been in a tailspin nationally. Average Sunday attendance nationwide has declined to around 60 per church, which is below the level to support one full-time rector. The majority of mainline Protestant churches have serious financial difficulties. Very few church leaders seem to be getting serious about growth. Grace Episcopal Church in Muskogee is surrounded by big growing churches, yet our growth seems to just plod along. If we choose to let things get us down, it would be easy to be pessimistic.

But just before Christmas I noticed one of the most hopeful things I have heard in a long while. The report came from a Harvard Business School professor’s studies about a hotel on a different continent owned and run by a deeply religious family from a non-Christian religion. In spite what seems to be huge cultural and religious differences between the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai and Grace Episcopal Church in Muskogee, I found the report incredibly positive, hopeful, and reason enough to be optimistic about our future. The optimism in this story, however, blooms from the ashes of a tragedy.

On November 26, 2008, terrorists attacked several locations in Mumbai, India. One of the attack sites was the Taj Mahal Hotel, where gunmen walked into the lobby and started shooting. In the midst of chaos, panic, and terror, ALL of the employees of the hotel risked their lives to save the hotel guests. Kitchen employees formed a human shield to help guests evacuate. They lost their lives as a result. The telephone operators were evacuated to safety, but chose to return to the hotel so they could call guests and tell them what to do. Waiters, room cleaners, and busboys, who knew all the back exits for the hotel, chose to stay in the building during the siege until their guests were safe. The general manager of the hotel lost his wife and two sons in a fire set by the terrorists. In spite of his terrible loss, he stayed at the hotel, helping guests get to safety.

Often, during a crisis, one or two heroes will emerge who risk their lives to help others. But in the case of the Taj Hotel, something much deeper was going on. These employees risked and some of them lost their lives in selfless acts of kindness and mercy to help people they did not even know. They did not think of themselves as heroes. In fact they were selected for and trained for their self-giving character.

A Harvard Business School professor happened to be working on a project at the Taj Hotel about nine months after the attack. He kept hearing stories and references to these incredible acts of mercy and kindness, so he decided to study the hotel to see where this extraordinary behavior came from.

A main thing was recruitment. When the hotel looks for low level employees such as maids and bellhops, they avoid big cities and turn to small towns where they develop relationships with local schools. They ask school officials to hand select people with qualifications the Taj Hotel is looking for. They do NOT look for students with the highest grades. They are recruiting for personal characteristics such as respect and empathy. They recruit for respect and empathy because those human values are very difficult to teach. In the same way, they do not hire hotel managers from the top business schools because those graduates are primarily motivated by money. Instead they look for managers from second tier business schools, again screening for personal integrity and empathy.

This is a highly unusual strategy in modern day India, where earning top grades and attending top schools is a national obsession. The Taj Hotel does the opposite of the rest of India. Instead of recruiting for top grades, they recruit for positive character traits.

The Taj Hotel is owned by an enormous conglomerate company which is run by an extremely religious family. They plow two thirds of their profits into a charitable trust for use in social justice projects. The hotel and all of the operating companies run by this family have a fine reputation for customer service. For example, when a hotel guest compliments and employee for any action, the hotel management rewards the employee behavior within 48 hours with a gift, cash, or even a promotion.

In a very real sense, the hotel employees on that terrible day in 2008 were performing the behaviors they were selected for and trained to perform. In other words, there was a system in place that selected for and formed people to behave in positive ethical ways. The hotel was a community that enabled and sustained positive ethical behavior.

In a very real sense, isn’t that what we strive to do at Grace Episcopal Church in our Sunday school and all of our Christian formation activities? We form children and adults around the Golden Rule. What we strive to produce at Grace is positive ethical behavior.

Many of you have been attending Grace Church much longer than me. You can look back at the generations and count all the kids you have seen grow up here. You know that most of those young adults have turned out very well with healthy productive families of their own. You know that many of them are active in giving back to their communities. They are the living fruits of our labor and God’s labor here at Grace Episcopal Church.

It took a Harvard Business School professor to demonstrate that positive ethical behavior can be instilled in an entire organization. If you have attended Grace for any length of time you have observed that already. We have been doing that for more than a century.

Nathanael asked Jesus how he knew him. Jesus replied that he saw Nathanael under the fig tree. After his confession of Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus said, “You believe in me because I saw you under the fig tree? … You will see greater things than these.”

Grace Episcopal Church has contributed so much value to the lives of children and adults for generations in this community. What we are called to do now is to grow and share that love. Jesus calls us too. And we will see even greater things.

At our annual meeting later this morning we will elect several new vestry members. One of my long-term goals here at Grace is to change the image of vestry service from an obligation of drudgery to a formative opportunity for Christians who enjoy having fun. As you know, however, vestries often get a bad reputation for focusing on the wrong things, often small stuff. At another church, I had a vestry member with a wry sense of humor. One time, when the vestry got wrapped around the axle on some $39 item, he chimed in with the observation, “That’s about as important as pimples on prom night.”

A long-standing problem in the Episcopal Church from top to bottom has been the tendency to focus on small stuff and ignore the big stuff. I won’t depress you with statistics because they are about the past and we need to be about the future. But just look at the opportunities around you. Look at all the space in here for new friends, old friends, guests, visitors, newcomers, and all kinds of new people.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in theology to understand the big stuff of the Bible. It is right there in the Gospel you just heard. What does Jesus tell us to do? A) Baptize people, and B) teach THEM what Jesus has taught US.

What if we took everything we did at Grace Episcopal Church and held it up to the Great Commission? What if we asked the question about every issue, “How does such and such help us either baptize new people or teach people what Jesus taught us?”

If we used the Great Commission as our yardstick, how would that make us different than we are now?

We would value the outsider, the stranger, the guest, the newcomer, more than we value our members. I am convinced that God sends messengers (angels) to us all the time. Many times we turn them away because they are different. At the peace we would seek out people we do not know and we would work to develop new relationships, new friendships.

We would value non-Christians more than Christians. We would do this, not because we want to add X new members to our rolls this year, but because we are excited about showing them about what God is doing in our life and in the life of this community.

I know, I know. Episcopalians are about as eager to talk about what God is doing in their life as they are to volunteer for a root canal. Most of us do not have the vocabulary or skills to talk about God, so we leave people with the impression that God must not be doing much here and they go somewhere else where they can find that excitement.

I ask you. Do you think God is at work in positive ways directly in Grace Episcopal Church in Muskogee? If we cannot convey to new people our own sense of excitement, then I guarantee you people will go somewhere else where there is much less to be excited about. What if we spent this year intentionally building the skills and vocabulary to work with newcomers and guests? What would happen if new people came to this church a year from now and after a while simply said, “Oh wow”?

There is no silver bullet, no magic elixir to grow a church. All I can do is be your cheerleader and point out to you all the good things that are happening here. You get to decide if God is behind this or not. As you think about this question and as you pray about this question, you get to discern if maybe you have experienced “Oh wow.”

And if you have, I invite you to learn how to pass it on.

For some reason we have not had any door to door evangelists visit us since we have lived in Oklahoma, while in pagan Maryland we had visitors “witnessing” to us as often as dandelions pop up on a spring lawn. I enjoyed having a little fun with them sometimes, so I would generally tell them that I was a priest at a nearby church. In Maryland if that is all you tell someone, they are going to assume you are Roman Catholic. Then I would let them start their spiel and I would interrupt saying “Let me get my girlfriend up here so she can hear what you have to say too.” This would invariably be met with an exchange of uncomfortable glances by the two black suited evangelists who would then beat a hasty retreat to my neighbors’ house.

Our gospel starts out telling us that John was sent as a witness to the Light. So it got me thinking about all the different kinds of ways in which we witness to the Light. There is the random approach: If you knock on enough doors, someone out there will invite you in. Some missionaries go door to door wearing starched white shirts and black suits like my visitors in Maryland. Then there is the “spray and pray” approach: If you spew enough militant Bible verses at perfect strangers and pray for success, someone might convert. And finally we have the “big brother knows best” approach, where typically a group of experts goes to a foreign country to dig a well, build a school or treat illnesses. Sadly, the vast majority of missionary attempts fail soon after the missionaries leave.

John was a witness to the light, the very first sign of God’s action in creation – “Let there be light.” John’s life and ministry served as a sign pointing to or revealing God. Even Jesus in John’s gospel reveals the nature of God. And we are also signs and witnesses pointing to God. After the resurrection, Jesus meets the disciples in the upper room and says, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” The word mission simply means to be sent. Those on a mission are sent somewhere by someone. If the majority of Christian attempts at mission fail, how are we to serve as witnesses to the light?

The fundamental problem with traditional witnessing, mission, or evangelism is that the missionary does all the talking and none of the listening. If we go out in the world thinking we have the answer for them, whether it is Jesus Christ or a GED diploma, what good do we do if we do not meet people’s needs? If someone is drowning, do we throw them a sandwich?

To be effective witnesses or evangelists, we need to listen to people, discover their needs, and start there. If you recall the big miracle stories in the Gospel, you will quickly realize that Jesus did NOT say “OK, I’m going to give all 5,000 of you people some food, but you must believe in me first.” He did not say that to the people he healed or raised from the dead either. He met their needs without condition or qualification. And, as in the case of the ten lepers where he healed and only one turned around to say thank you, not everyone will thank us or even recognize what we do.

Let me summarize how mission typically fails, and then we will talk about how it succeeds. Witness and mission most often fails because we get in the way. We think we have all the answers and we do not listen to the real needs of the other person. Secondly, most Christian mission efforts come with strings attached such as “we will only help you if you will attend our church.” For example, the pastor of a local church went to an elementary school and performed magic tricks for the children. I have no problem with that. Next he invited them to his church that night to see more magic. When 80 kids showed up that night, instead of magic tricks and entertainment, they got 2.5 hours of hard core guilt-inducing altar call preaching.

Jesus never attached any strings to his invitations and neither should we. Finally, the very way we evaluate mission and evangelism is inappropriate at best. We use worldly measures to gauge our success such as: How many people attend your church? How many people did you preach to in Guatemala? How many meals did you serve? How many people did your physicians heal? How many teeth were fixed, eyes examined, and so on and so on. Staff salaries for people who work at churches are based on these models and they are all wrong. They are not God’s ways.

Then what are Biblical models of testifying to the light? You can break down every action of Jesus in three steps: Listen, Give, Love. We have certainly listened to the needs of those in the community who are hungry. We feed people through Meals on Wheels and our own Servings of Grace programs. We give people food with no strings attached. We do not preach at them while they eat nor do we make them feel guilty if they don’t attend our church. We just feed them. These are healthy examples of testifying to the light.

We had a wonderful GED program running for 29 years. There are some conversations now about providing educational assistance. Should we start by providing after school tutoring? Should we consider starting a school? Whatever we do in new mission areas, we must listen to the needs of the community first.

We are beginning to get the idea of witnessing through our connections to the wider community. We have had very positive outcomes at the Chili Cookoff, Cardboard Boat Race, and most recently the Christmas Parade. We tell the community who we are by being present, by participating, by smiling, by engaging children in positive ways. Now we are handing out bookmarks that tell a little more about who we are. These serve as low key invitations. No guilt, no pressure. Try us out some Sunday; we are different than the others.

The physical appearance of our buildings and property is another aspect of how Grace Episcopal Church testifies to the light. If you haven’t seen our chapel at night, I encourage you to drive by and check it out after dark. If you go to the corner of Broadway and Sixth and view our property across the parking lots you will get an entirely different message. One that says, “We are run down and dilapidated. You cannot even know our name unless you can find the two tiny little rusted metal signs. You are welcome here but don’t trip on the broken up sidewalks. You will have to guess how to get into the church from here.”

An architect from the state of Oklahoma visited us last week. He is involved with the city on a long term plan to improve the appearance downtown. As he toured our property, he was astonished to learn that the parking lots to the south of the church actually belong to us. He thought they belonged to the car dealer. Although his office cannot do our design work, he did provide encouragement (and references) for our integration of our south parking lots and signage into the overall renovation plan.

How do we testify to the light? We are doing a terrific job of renovating how Grace Episcopal Church relates to and connects to our local community. We will be renovating these buildings very soon. If we can change our thinking and understand that our front door to the public is the south parking lots, then perhaps we can renovate our front door before Easter rolls around.

We do not renovate these buildings primarily for ourselves. We do it for others as part of our mission. We do not grow as individual Christians primarily for ourselves. We do it because at the end of our days we will be judged based upon what we have done for other people. So I ask you, can we renovate our front door for others too?

We spent the summer of our second year in seminary traveling in England and Wales. While touring the Tower of London, the tour guide, who was dressed in one of those Beefeater outfits looking like he had stepped off the label of a bottle of gin, detailed the famous wives of Henry VIII who were beheaded there. He worked his way around the crowd talking about Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves. When he was right behind our oldest daughter who was about 14 at the time (going on 20) he put his arms on her shoulders in front of this large group of tourists and said, “Now Kathryn Howard would have been about 19, just your age, when Henry found favor with her.” I will never forget how much my young adolescent daughter blushed just to be singled out like that in a crowd.

Isn’t it wonderful to be noticed sometimes? Of course when you are an adolescent like Mary the mother of Jesus, or our daughter at the Tower of London, being noticed or being favored can be embarrassing, perplexing and downright uncomfortable. I think my daughter’s reaction to being favored by the tour guide must have been similar to Mary’s reaction of embarrassment and bewilderment.

“How can this be?” she must have asked. “Me, a teenage girl, a virgin, engaged to an older man, from a nobody family, in a nowhere little town! How can I be favored? How can this be? Why would the Most High God want to pick me out of all the girls in Israel? If this is really true, I could get in big trouble with the village. Me, pregnant with the son of the Most High! They will stone me for sure. What can I do? This is truly scary.”

Isn’t that the way we all are? When something about us breaks us out of our comfort zone, we become afraid and wonder what will happen to us. Perhaps you won the lottery. Maybe you fell in love with your soul mate. Your first child was born. Or maybe, you got a nudge about really changing your life, kicking an addiction, starting a program to help the needy, or going back to school. I talk to lots of people who question whether God actively works in our lives. I tell them that all you have to do is pay attention to the extra-ordinary events of your life. God is there, changing you, forming you, helping you, saving you, and at the end, helping you walk through that turnstile into the next life.

If you are completely clueless, you may not notice God at work in your life. If you are a completely self absorbed egotistical narcissist you will not notice God at work in your life. But if you have managed to escape these two sand traps of life, you should be able to notice that God is there – nudging, pointing, saving, healing, and yes, even making you embarrassed and uncomfortable.

God was certainly at work in Mary’s life. We have no idea how many other young girls Gabriel visited before one of them said yes to this outrageous proposition. In the same way we never know when we feel nudged, pushed, or transformed. How many other people were given the same opportunity before we said yes?

The angel Gabriel visited Mary and began this remarkable announcement with “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” We continue to say this to one another, sometimes in greetings, and formally we say it in the Eucharist. There is an old joke about how do you know a bunch of Episcopalians are watching an old Star Wars movie? Because every time Obie Wan Kenobi says, “The force be with you”, the audience says, “And also with you.” You too are favored.

But there is more to “Greetings favored one! The Lord is with you.” That more is our response. We have baptized four children today. As a congregation we have affirmed that we will support these young people in their life of faith. The Lord is with you, and also with the newly baptized.

Part of our job as a community of faithful people, as parents, sponsors, and grandparents is raise up these children in the knowledge and love of God so that they truly know deep down that the Lord is with them and the Lord favors them. When we are able to live into this knowledge of the Lord’s favor, we will know that we are truly blessed – not necessarily with material goods, but with the spiritual power necessary to deal with everything that life and death can do to us.

When God calls our name – whether that call is to get married, become a parent, become a doctor, serve as a priest, or to come to the end of our days – we will know that God favors us and God is with us. And we will respond just like Mary did so long ago, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Just ten years ago in a small town halfway between Baltimore and Washington, I celebrated Christmas Eve services with my new parish of four months. As you know too well, maintaining these quaint old church buildings can have its own charm and headaches. In the fall of 2001, a plague visited on that little church in Laurel Maryland was a plague of squirrels. In a quaint mill town with lots of century old hardwood trees, a squirrel could find a lot to love. But when the weather turns cold, the little critters first try to find someplace warm to spend the winter. And the Episcopal Church on Main Street with a little hole in one of the ventilators welcomed them. Dozens of them.

A few weeks before Christmas I learned how someone years earlier had tried to save on heating costs by installing a small piece of steel flashing to cover the inside hole from the ventilators at the peak of the roof. It was a high ceiling church like this one. In the middle of the early service Eucharist, the sight of little bits of insulation falling to the center aisle near the back of the church caught my eye. An octogenarian usher thought such stuff should not be left in the aisle so he bent over to pick up the bits of pink insulation. Somewhere around “Do this in memory of me” came the horrible sound and sight of a two foot square piece of steel crashing on its side about a foot from the poor man’s head. The sound was like a marching band cymbal clanging. I really thought we would have several candidates for CPR at that moment.

After church that Sunday the crew came in to green the church in time honored tradition. Laurel was named for the indigenous mountain laurel plants that grow around the area. They are also evergreen, and the plants were woven into sixty foot long strands of green to be hung from each major roof truss. Everything was green and lovely. During the week before Christmas, in my custom to pray in the quiet of the church, I could occasionally hear the sound of the squirrels in the attic. I brought binoculars one day to confirm my worst fears. There was a direct opening through the ventilator shaft from the attic space into the ceiling of the church.

There was not time to bring in the pest exterminators before Christmas. They were all tied up with holiday cheer and much bigger clients. I prayed, I fretted, and I dreaded the possibilities. Imagine a full church on your first Christmas service with them and the cousins of Alvin and the chipmunks poking their heads into the ceiling and saying, “Hey guys, look at the forest in here.” The scene rolled around in my head like a low budget version of Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation.

The blessed hour came with the midnight mass and holiday spirits in fine shape. No visitation of the blessed church rodents. I went home and collapsed, thanking God for the gift of Jesus and for the separation of church and squirrels.

Isn’t that what everybody does around the holidays? We always manage to find something that grabs our attention and we obsess about it. The perfect party. Getting all the right gifts for people. Making sure the cards go out. Getting lights on the tree and around the house. In my case I obsessed over squirrels in the attic.

But take a minute to step back from the holiday trivia and look at the big picture. The unimaginable being who created the universe, set the planets in motion, and who gives life and breath to every living creature. That being chose to become human in the form of a baby. Completely dependent and vulnerable in every way just like any of us. It is scandalous. It is crazy. And it is true.

This unimaginable being whose name we don’t even know wants us to love creation and other people with the same love as we are loved. We are to forgive as we are forgiven. We are given a beautiful life. Every day of our life is a gift from this creator. We honor what we have been given by sharing the love with others. Traditions, religions, creeds, and doctrines will ultimately all fall away before the big picture.

We were known and loved before we were knit in our mother’s womb.

Take a moment to ponder the immense size of the universe and the even greater love that is there for each one of us. Then in another breath consider this all came into focus in the form of a tiny baby long ago in a remote back country village.

It kind of puts squirrels and holiday madness in perspective, doesn’t it?

2002 started off with a bonus for the local critter control company. Before Epiphany they came out and over three days trapped sixty eight squirrels. At $25 apiece, their year was off to a good start.