January 2019 Newsletter Message

We have just come through our busiest and most exciting month of the year, loaded with joyful activities focused on the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. We helped local people have a great Christmas by adopting a girl through the Salvation Army Angel Tree and supporting Courtyard Estates’ “Santa for a Senior” program. We delighted in the different perspectives of the four Gospel authors through the “Christmas in Four-Part Harmony” presentation on Youth Advent Sunday. We shared Christmas joy with our homebound brothers and sisters and local senior community residents in our annual evening of Christmas caroling. We shared the good news of Jesus in song and spoken word in the Christmas Eve Service of Seven Lessons and Carols.

But the calendar has now turned over to a new year, and all of those joyful events have come and gone. Yes, the twelve days of Christmas are ongoing as this month begins, concluding with our Epiphany service on January 6; however, things certainly feel different once the Christmas season is on the downswing. We emerge from that moving, engaging, and peculiarly special season into the bleak midwinter period of regular routines disrupted perhaps only by inclement weather. December’s “ho-ho-ho” yields all too quickly to January’s ho-hum, and the Christmas season of wonder ends with us feeling bored and wondering what to do next.

It is in this transition to boring, predictable, and routine, though, that the we have pause to consider the meaning of all that we have just celebrated, to consider what it means for us and for the world on an everyday basis that Christ, the Savior, is born. The seasons of Advent and Christmas fill us with joy in the truth and reality of Jesus, but then God sends us out the rest of the year to show people the difference it makes that the good news of Jesus is real and true. God sends us out to give people a foretaste of eternal redemption through Christ by improving their lives in the here and now. God sends us out to model a community lifestyle of equality and fellowship, as all of us stand before God as equals due to the human sinfulness we share in common (and, along with that, our need for God’s saving grace in Christ). God sends us out to share the peace and connectedness of our congregation with people who are in need of just those sorts of things.

We have two upcoming opportunities to share in this work to which the Christmas message inspires us:

• Friday, Jan. 18 (2pm-4pm, SIU/Graham Learning Lab in former Coleman Clinic building, 175 S. Main): Poverty Simulation - The University of Illinois Extension and Southern Illinois University School of Medicine are leading this event to help our community develop creative ideas for addressing the challenge of poverty in our area. The event is free and will be very powerful, especially if you have never lived in poverty yourself.
  
• Monday, Jan. 28 (5pm-7pm): Snapper Villas Meal by TLC - We will share homestyle food and fellowship with the Spoon River College students who live in the new Snapper Villas dormitory! Stay tuned for more information about this project as the month continues (though you can let me know if you are interested in cooking or serving)!
  

Though the Christmas lights and decorations will be coming down on January 6 after worship, let us go out to reveal Christ to the people around us. Even when the joyful events of Christmas have come and gone, we servants of the Lord rejoice because it is now that the work of Christmas has begun, as our choir sang in their postlude on Christmas Eve:
When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost, to heal the broken,
To feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations; to bring peace among brothers,
To make music from the heart.

The peace of the Lord be with you as we join together in this work!
Pastor Micah