2020

Many of us really enjoy tradition during the holiday season—if there is ever a time we want things to be normal, it’s at Christmas. Like everything else in 2020, however, Advent and Christmas will be unusual this year. Since we know that going into the holidays, hopefully we’ll be prepared to cope with what we can’t fundamentally change.

In sure knowledge that this month’s Thanksgiving will not be normal for most of us, here nevertheless is a poem reflecting on the holiday. It was written by John Berryman, and selected and collected in one of editor Garrison Keillor’s fine anthologies, Good Poems for Hard Times (New York: Penguin, 2005), 163.

By the time you read this, we will be entering the final month before the 2020 presidential election. Here’s some of what I’m thinking. For Jesus’ followers, prayer is political speech and political action. Does that make any sense to you?

I thought I might say something in this space about what justice and peace mean to me. At the beginning of my life, not much! Justice and peace were not central concerns of the evangelical Christian congregations (in Riverdale, Illinois and, after we moved, in Detroit, Michigan) in which I came to faith and discipleship. My early churches focused almost exclusively on personal salvation.