Welcome

Have you ever sat down to write something and you knew what you wanted to say, but God kept interrupting?

Earlier this week I needed to think about this Welcome Statement ­ and knowing that our theme for this evening was "The Haunting Breath of God," I knew it would a cinch to connect my Welcome to that theme.

So I sat down and waited for inspiration, and I heard God say, "Christmas."

I could understand that ­ stores already have their Christmas paraphernalia out, and the church choir has been practicing Advent hymns and where I live in northern Wisconsin, it's already begun to snow.

"Christmas is good. I'll get to that in a month!" That's what I said to God.

And I sat back and I waited again for "Haunting" revelations. But it was Christmas that kept coming. God wouldn't quit and so I gave in. With apologies to our worship leaders who have worked very hard to have this service hang together well, here are my thoughts about Christmas.

When this Kairos community gathers, it feels like Christmas. It feels like the fullness of God's time. Those of us who have been planning these days together have been waiting expectantly for you. We've known your names, but we've longed to see your faces. We've been waiting to breath the same air, to hear your voices, to delight in the new ways God's Spirit is blowing through us.

I don't know about you. But the state of our world, of this nation, of our church has made me feel weary and overwhelmed and even jaded at times. There are moments when it feels like we are in the middle of a hopeless mess.

Fortunately, God loves a good mess. That's what Christmas is about. It's because things are a mess that God's said, "I'm gonna come and plop down in the middle of it all ­ and I'm gonna sit with you. I am gonna taste the salt of your tears and I'm gonna listen to the voiceless cry of your heart and I'm gonna let you tell me about the hurt and the fears and the anger that rend your soul ­ and I'm gonna stay there in the mess with you."

God's coming to visit the mess. But be clear that this is not a "misery loves company" moment. God's coming for transformation ­ to make the mess less messy, and the darkness less dark, and to say to us, "Fear not."

But one of the things we know about Christmas is that God doesn't just magically appear. Barbara Brown Taylor says that God gets smuggled into the world inside our own bodies.

So that's why we've come: to claim our calling as God-bearers. We are here to discover new and prophetic ways of smuggling God into this world and into the church.

Something new, something wonderful, something powerfully infused with God-energy will be born among us. And when we look back on this time together, we will not know for certain when or how we became pregnant ­ all we will know is that we have given birth and that we are holding new life in our hands and in our hearts ­ and it is nothing less than the Divine.

Kairos CoMotion reminds me of Christmas. Welcome. It is good to be together.

Amy DeLong - Kairos CoMotion Chair