By Marian Wright Edelman
In many homes, this is the height of a long-anticipated season of celebrations, surprises, light, and joy. It is also a moment when many people across faiths are taking extra time to consider how they can share joy with others, especially children. Even as millions of people are preparing to celebrate the birth of a poor, homeless child threated by Herod’s violence whom Christians call Savior, there are fears about new threats to children and young people in our own land. The poor baby in a manger sometimes gets lost like so many others needing food, shelter, safety, education, and joy and hope for the future. This is an opportunity to recommit to service and justice and to act on God’s call through the prophet Zechariah “to see that justice is done, to show kindness and mercy to one another, not to oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, who live among you or anyone else in need.”
I share special prayers for this moment:
Lord, it is Christmas and
Herod is searching for and destroying our children,
pillaging their houses, corrupting their minds, poisoning their views,
killing and imprisoning the sons, orphaning the daughters,
widowing the mothers.
Herod’s soldiers are everywhere,
in government, on Wall Street, in religious houses, schoolhouses, and movie houses,
Please lead us and our children to safety.
For Christians, the Advent season is a time to prepare for a coming, an arrival. The next prayer is from Thankful Praise: A Resource for Christian Worship, edited by Keith Watkins.
God, we confess that ours is still a world in which Herod seems to rule:
The powerful are revered,
The visions of the wise are ignored,
The poor are afflicted,
And the innocent are killed.
You show us that salvation comes
in the vulnerability of a child,
yet we hunger for the “security” of weapons and walls.
You teach us that freedom comes in loving service,
yet we trample on others in our efforts to be “free.”
Forgive us, God, when we look to the palace
instead of the stable,
when we heed politicians more than prophets.
Renew us with the spirit of Bethlehem,
That we may be better prepared for Your coming.
Amen.
The final prayer is one of the mediations collected in Howard Thurman’s book The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations. It is titled “Christmas Is Waiting to Be Born”:
Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes
And the heart consumes itself, as if it would live,
Where children age before their time,
And life wears down the edges of the mind,
Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day’s life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN:
In you, in me, in all mankind.