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So it is a good thing we have sweet little baby Marlie to celebrate on Sunday because the Gospel reading for this week is intense, and there is no glimpse of the teeny, tiny Jesus with the balled-up fists who often gets celebrated this time of year. Nope, this passage is more reminiscent of the visions we wrestled with during the All Saints Service from the book of Revelation and revisited last week during Christ the King Sunday.

What, more apocalypse? But this is Christmas-time. As we prepare for Christ’s birth why not focus on hope and celebrate all things sweetness and light?

I ate the last of my Granny’s pear preserves on a gluten free bagel today. I stood there at the counter and scraped every last bit out of the mason jar with my orange plastic kid’s knife from IKEA: every sliver of pear, every drop of that sweet syrup clinging to the walls. And I cried while I did it.

Ruth is a story over 2000 years old yet it carries themes that seem to speak into the heart of contemporary culture: questions of how to treat resident aliens from another land, how women use limited resources, including their bodies and sexuality, to procure protection for themselves and their kin, and how God meets us in the mundane and the messy corners of our lives.

 Home is not a place. Home is where your people are.   Ms. Maggie taught me this lesson last year as Richie, Coleman and I prepared to leave Boston after four years. Ms. Maggie was Coleman’s first teacher. She runs a home-based childcare in our former neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, and has been caring for children and families for over twenty …