Let’s be honest. It’s hard to get into the customary pre-Christmas frenzy. When I read that 795,000 people have died from Covid in this country alone, it’s hard to get excited about what’s under the tree. Then there are the worldwide deaths and the mess in Washington.

I will admit my playlist is retro because I have never gotten over the sixties. However, some years ago I found a singer named Ted Small. One of his songs has this line: “When gravity is getting you down, look up.” While walking around the neighborhood this week, I listened to this song, and I thought of the words in our Eucharist, “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord.” I realized I need a reorientation.

This is not about ignoring what’s going on in our country or in our world. It’s about remembering to hope. When we run out of what we can do, we are called to remember what God can and will do and to lift up our hearts to focus on that. My faith in our politicians to make our country or this world right is small, but my confidence in God’s ability to do so is unshaken.

In part, this is because of what God has done for me in my life. Without God, I would never have gotten sober from alcohol or adopted two wonderful children or found Jo, my wife, or gotten into graduate school or gotten ordained or anything. “All things come from Thee O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee.” All things. To lift up my heart to the Lord is to be reoriented. As the mystic Simone Weil said, “It’s up to me to think of God and up to God to think of me.”

Really, I don’t need anything under the Christmas tree. I need to lift up my heart and dare to hope for the Savior to break in and make all people new. I don’t need another blue sweater -- I have four -- and I have no more space for books. Instead of stuff, I need to ask, or more importantly, to pray for God to break into this world and turn everyone and everything right side up, beginning with me. I mean the return of civility; the birth of kindness and peace; the birth of genuine community; confronting racism and inequality, the birth of hope and no more despair -- 45,000 Americans committed suicide in 2020.

The poet Jane Hirschfield wrote, “Hope is the hardest love we carry.” This is the time to yearn for the birth and for our finding our heart’s deep home. The world’s mess is too deep for presents or ornaments or food to do much good. We need God to be born in us and in this world and to make everything new.

Come, Lord Jesus.