Haapsalu, 5.12.2022 – Wishing you a blessed Advent season! May it guide us toward Christmas! This year I want to celebrate Christmas in the Holy Land and pray where Mary gave birth to her first son. Already habitual stability and peace have been replaced by uncertainty and worries.
Recent years have brought new experiences – Covid-19 and now war. Throughout history, different situations have alternated. Our hearts beat, we breathe in and out, we’re awake and fall asleep. We’re accompanied by the rhythm of day and night and the changing of the seasons. Yet every day and every year there is a new waiting. Let’s not forget in this busy advent season that Christmas will always come. Advent and Christmas are always the same. There is charm in this repetition. The rhythm sets the World in order. Truest joy is unfading in the darkest night. Once again we light the Advent candles one by one and then it’s Christmas light and joy.
In my first Christmas sermon, in Kuusalu church in 1970, I said: “Together with the shepherds, we go to seek and find the Blessed One in Bethlehem. We can celebrate Christmas in the greatest poverty and under a barrage of bullets. The most important part is not the presents and the shining tree, but the Blessed One we found in the manger. We can feel the full joy of Christmas as we go forward with Him, standing under the cross and witnessing the resurrection. Then it will be a Christmas that never ends!”
Mary and Joseph, being descendants of David, came from Nazareth to Bethlehem, their ancestral home for the census. There must’ve been quite a crowd and a lot of hustle and bustle. Joseph and Mary had to find a place to stay for the night. I recall that Joseph, although being a respected craftsman in his hometown of Nazareth, was not a wealthy man. The carpenter, with his expectant wife, had to leave his job for a while and probably spend some of his savings. In Bethlehem, it was necessary to find shelter where the child could be born, and you can't imagine a better place than a cave. Thanks to this, the place still exists today.
But that was not all. Joseph with his wife and baby had to flee persecutors and live in a foreign land for years before returning back home. A Good craftsman like Joseph could find work anywhere, but all those years were certainly not easy for any of them – Joseph, Mary or Jesus. Jesus had no place in this world.
My first-grade classmate's mother, Laine Sundja, wrote:
Love born simply to the World, in a stable somewhere in Bethlehem. Only few shepherds felt the joy,
precious was He to few.
Love came and fed the hungry, the last morsel He gave.
Tenderly He comforted broken hearts, yet he was despised.
By your side Love is still – Jesus walks with you. Halt, my friend, halt for a moment. Accept the Love!
This year, our special prayer is Christmas peace and an end to the war in Ukraine. I wish that both sides would pray together for peace! God, hear our common prayer!
In my intercession, I especially bring before God the work of the Estonian-speaking congregation in St. Petersburg! I wish You could feel true Christmas peace this holiday season!
