Seersucker and a Collar: Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar: Day 24

As I begin the last post of this series, this seems only appropriate.

And here he is - the last Lego of the series:

Yoda dressed as Santa Claus! How great is that. Yoda is an odd little dude - green, short, hunched, hair in very geriatric locales. But, at the same time, wise and powerful. I remember when I first saw him duel during the prequel trilogy. First, there was a lot of screaming and flipping, which was just strange. Also, I always assumed that he would never need to fight. He was so powerful all he would have to do to an opponent was say, "defeated you are," and s/he was. I guess that would have made for boring filmmaking.

Also, at first, Yoda seems rather grumpy (I would be grumpy too if I had been stuck on a swamp planet for over two decades), but thinking back on the "saga," he possesses a great deal of patience. He is a teacher and he meditates, both disciplines requiring a great deal of patience. Furthermore, his actions speak volumes. A person of his power and wisdom would undoubtedly be tempted to, when confronted with the petty annoyances of life (Sith, bureaucracy, Gungans), take matters into his own hands - but he did not. Plus, anyone with the patience to train a whiny Mark Hamill demands respect.

The Archbishop of Canterbury wrote a beautiful article that was published in The Times today. In it, he related the tragic tale Congolese children abducted by terrorists. He wrote,

"I won't try and make readers wince with the details, though they are the sort of thing that you wish you could forget; the important thing is that they had escaped. They had been brought out of the bush, prised out of the grip of the militias that had captured them and reintroduced to something like normality. At twenty-one or twenty-two, some were completing their secondary school work. All had been assured of a safe place to live if they managed to get away from the militias. Many had been reunited with families. They had advocates and helpers in their communities, people who were willing to stick their necks out to support them when others looked at them with suspicion or even disgust.

How had it happened? They all had one answer. The Church had not given up on them. At great risk, members of local Christian communities had kept contact with them, sometimes literally gone in search of them, helped them escape and organized a return to civilian life. They had prepared congregations to receive them, love them and gradually get them back into ordinary human relationships.

It wasn't just a story of happy endings. The trauma of these experiences doesn't go away overnight. Drug use, conditioned behavior, the deadening of emotions, all these take time and involve a fair number of failures as well as successes. The miracle is that any manage rehabilitation or perhaps the miracle is that anyone believes enough in the possibility of it.
Yet the message was always the same: 'they didn't give up on us'."

I write and preach and blog a lot about Emmanuel, the God with us, the miracle of the Creator of the Universe wanting to know and be with and love each and every one of us. That is an amazing gift and a theological reality that in and of itself is enough to celebrate on this holy night. But God does more.

We continue to reject God, we continue to reject this gift. From the Garden to Gethsemane, we, in our brokenness, in our self-centeredness, try to separate ourselves from God. And yet God, remembering our covenant with God, keeps coming back. God never gives up.

And the ultimate expression of God's not giving up is Jesus. God so loved us that he gave his very self. I am not giving up, he says. No matter what you do, no matter what you try, no matter what you try to pull, I am not giving up.

++Rowan continues,

"'I'm not going away' is one of the most important things we can ever hear, whether we hear it from someone at our bedside in illness or over a shared drink at a time of depression or stress – or at a moment when we wonder what's happening to our neighborhood and our society. This is the heart of what Christmas says about God. And it's the real justification for any local church or any national church being there. When people are pushed by all sorts of destructive forces into seeing themselves as hopeless, as rubbish, so that what they do doesn't matter any more, it's this that will make the change that matters."

As you sip your first cup of coffee tomorrow morning, as you open presents with beloved family or friends, as you shuffle off to church, or as you awake to an empty house, remember this: in the words of C3-PO, "we're doomed." We are doomed to be loved by God, doomed to encounter God in ways we will never anticipate, and doomed to be joined by God on every step of our journey. God is not going to give up - so get used to it!