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Faces on Faith: God makes his home among the people

2 min read

Many Christians are familiar with the Advent wreath; a circle of evergreens with four candles usually purple, or blue and a larger white center candle. The four candles represent the four weeks of Advent and are lit one by one each week. On Christmas the center or Christ candle is lighted.

There is another tradition which is less well known and that is the Jesse Tree. It is described in “Celtic Daily Prayer.”

“In many homes and churches it has become an Advent custom to use a small tree branch as a Jesse Treehung with pictures and ornaments representing the people, prophecies and stories, which anticipated the coming of Christ.”

I use this book for my morning prayer and each day during Advent one such image is used. Today it was the Ark of the Covenant. You can read about it in Exodus 25:17-22; 35:30-35. The ancient Israelites saw the ark as the place where they met God and it was carried with them in their wilderness wanderings. Today’s meditation on the ark speaks to it’s purpose:

“God speaks to us in pictures

smoke and glory; angel’s wings;

light eternal; holy, radiant light

In the center of all things,

the hidden place behind the veil.

Can God be held, contained

in a box of gold and wood?

Look! God makes His home

here among the people:

the hidden focus of our life”

Christmas is celebrated by Christians and non-Christians alike. There is something about the story of the baby in the manger in the backwater town; something about shepherds and angels and strangers from afar that speaks to the human heart. I don’t have a problem with that at all. The story of Jesus crosses all kinds of lines.

What the Church calls the Incarnation, God taking on human flesh, stands at the heart of it’s faith. We don’t “go up” to meet God. God comes to us, becomes one of us. Anything that God touches, including humanity is holy, expressed so well in an invitation to Holy Communion: “Holy food for holy people.”

God is not contained in one or another boxes, nor penned in by walls and fences.

“Look! God makes His home here among the people.”

John N. Cedarleaf, Captiva Chapel by the Sea.