Still More Post Christmas Musings

Even with a great big and very bright heavenly star to guide them, the men from the East needed direction.  Finding Jesus who was wrapped in obscurity and poverty was apparently no easy task.  When they got close, they went to Jerusalem and asked King Herod, "Where is this child who has been born king of the Jews...?" (Matthew 2:2).  Maybe the men from the East assumed one they knew to be a king would surely be born in a place of prominence.  If so, they were surely wrong for Bethlehem was no Jerusalem and the animal stall was no hotel room.

 

Those traveling men were not the first to have difficulty finding the poor, nor are they the last.  Those of us who travel the journey of our life often need directions as well.  Not long ago while visiting another town noted for its upscale lifestyle, I drove through some of the communities which were not gated but could have been.  As I looked at million dollar homes on lakes and golf courses, I could not help but wonder if some of these pseudo rich, owned by the bank folks knew where the poor lived in their community.  I wondered if they ever saw them. And while their extravagance is not mine, there is enough in my own life to cause me to wonder how in touch I am with the fact that the world around me is filled with those living in a poverty I cannot comprehend.  And, perhaps, it is also a poverty I do not want to see.

 

Certainly, during the Christmas season it is fashionable and appropriate to lift the cover of obscurity from the poor of the community so they can be showered with the gifts of the seasonal "well-meaners," but then after a moment, they will be allowed to disappear again.  Unlike Jesus who seemed to attract the poor and the broken, there seems to be so little about our own lifestyle that invites the downtrodden of the world to seek us out as those who can surely be counted as one of the compassionate and caring ones of the world.