BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
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  • BUUC Home
  • Events
  • About the BUUC
    • Our History
    • BUUC Committees >
      • Executive Committee
      • Worship Committee
      • Membership Committee
      • The Women's Alliance
      • Flower Committee
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • A Waste of time
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
  • Our Covenant
  • Minister's Welcome
  • Religious Exploration
  • Music & Choir
  • We Rise: Social Justice Resources
  • Newsletters
  • Church Calendar
  • Unitarian Universalism
  • Driving Directions
  • Photos of Us
  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH

A Great Light
(Christmas Eve Reflection and Prayer)
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church

December 24, 2013

The Rev. Craig M. Nowak

          Angels appearing in the sky…shepherds setting aside their daily routine to go and see a newborn baby… a star that moves in the sky…and wisemen who follow it and bring gifts to a child born in a manger…a young woman...a virgin accepting on faith the message of a visiting angel that she will bear a child and her bewildered partner going along with it all.

          No gift placed under any tree or inside any stocking on Christmas, no matter how unexpected or hard won, could engender such a sense of magic and surprise… hope and wonder as the story of Jesus’ birth as imagined in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  

          Perhaps this is why, each year, on this night we join with the seers, saints, and sinners of ages past, to retell the Christmas story… It is a story perhaps intentionally hard to believe but one that nonetheless reveals to us an undeniable truth and even miracle…that the birth of an infant, an infant who would grow into the Jesus remembered in the Gospels…or “Good News”, forever changed the world. 

          Perhaps even more unbelievable…yet no less a truth and miracle is that the same is true of our own birth…whether we’re speaking of our actual physical birth or the ways in which we are reborn throughout our lives…  

          Indeed, the birth, life, and ministry of Jesus speaks to this truth…of a need to prepare for and celebrate the birth of hope…to be willing to be reborn…to open oneself, to make oneself vulnerable to a change of heart and mind… trusting the promise that when we do so, the world will never be the same.  It is a message too easily forgotten in the hyper activity of our commercialized celebrations and too easily dismissed in the face the brutality, suffering, and desperation so prevalent in the world and our own hearts. 

          And yet…we return as if by invitation, to hear…to imagine and relive…to celebrate… a story with angels, shepherds, and wisemen… and a young couple and the newborn baby.  Christmas is indeed an invitation…an invitation to journey to that place within ourselves where the hope and promise of new life and a new way of living can be born again and again and again…that the work of Christmas can begin anew…to heal the wounds of generations…to bind up the broken…to embrace the forgotten, the poor, the sick, the lonely, the imprisoned, the marginalized, and the despised.

          It is the promise spoken of by the prophet Isaiah...“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.  For unto us a child is born.”[1] And so it is again this night…a great light shines once again and hope is born anew for us...for all people.

Birth, rebirth… miracles as messy and scary as they are joyous and hopeful…This is the reality…the magic…the truth that lives on in the Christmas story…

Let us Pray...

          Beloved, Tonight, above the sounds of earth’s lamentations, we turn toward the darkened night sky of our being to seek a star…a star to lead us home…to that place within our hearts and minds we may greet the promise of Emmanuel, “God with us.”… a place free of the tyranny of small mindedness and dulled imagination.  

          Ease our fears that we might risk the journey and awaken us to a way of living and being unimaginable to the cynics and naysayers in the world and within ourselves…a way of living and being terrifying to the abusers of earthly power…in which we see and treat one another as ourselves and know one another as sacred, precious, and beloved of you, oh God..oh Light that dwells within and beyond each one of us.

          We pray this Christmas Eve not only for ourselves, for those gathered here, but for all people… especially those both near and among us as well as far from us whose lives are made much harder and bitter by the tragedy of war, the sting of poverty, prolonged unemployment, illness, bullying, discrimination, and other forms of spiritual and physical violence and oppression.  People for whom this night is a reminder of a promise in many ways as yet unfulfilled but for whom we pray by our words and deeds hope might still burn brightly as a star against the dark night sky of the soul’s midwinter.

          And we give thanks for this night and all the moments in our lives when time seems to stand still and we are blessed with a glimpse or sense of your abiding presence.  May our hearts and minds be open to hear the promise of the Christmas story and may our lives, lived in love, bear witness to the possibility and necessity of its fulfillment.       

Amen and Blessed Be



[1] Isaiah 9:2, 6. (The Bible, KJV)


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