“At the center of the Christmas story is hope…hope which comes to us in the form of a vulnerable, poor baby. A child, not a king, changes the world. God appears to us as a marginalized, Afro-Semitic, Jewish child from Nazareth in Palestine. A child who grows up to teach us to welcome the stranger. How would our world be different if we loved our neighbors as ourselves?” asks the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church.

When Jesus prayed, he found a sense of sacred oneness, when Buddha meditated, he became awake to deeper levels of awareness. No one truly knows the effectiveness of prayer, but one thing is for sure- when we take the time to be still, to slow down, to go inward, we almost always discover something about ourselves and the potential awareness that we are not alone.

We are here to praise and enjoy God with body and soul, mind and heart, with song and word, with hands and feet. We are here to give because of the abundance God has given us, to share with each other, and to receive, because God has created us to depend on each other. We are here to celebrate the differences that otherwise might divide us: differences of age, of body, of culture, of opinion, of ability, of religious conviction. We are here to put things in perspective: to celebrate what matters, to laugh about things we take too seriously, to cry about things that truly touch our hearts. So may it be this morning: Amen!

Born to a poor uneducated carpenter and his partner All: Jesus was one with oppressed humankind

Leader: It is a night of anticipation, a night of waiting. People: We wait, as Mary and Joseph waited for the birth of their son.

Leader: In this Advent season, we honor a time in history when people anticipated the birth of a child. People: The child grew to be a man who gave hope to his people.

We worship and adore God, source, essence, and aim of all things, spirit that enlivens all beings.

"Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est." A Taize chant is incorporated into a opening invocation

Let us take a short period of silence to reflect on those with whom we need to be reconciled and what action we can take to make this happen.