MY NAME IS JESUS AND I'M AN ALCOHOLIC

(By Harry Nigh)
www.friendsofdismas.ca

It's become a tradition at Dismas Fellowship to put on a skit at our Christmas celebration. The Christmas story always comes across in a loving though somewhat "twisted" way as some have called it. We like to have as many people involved as possible and to act like kids again.

If your memories of Christmas include your father pulling down the Christmas tree in a drunken rage, this may be the first time you've ever acted in a Christmas pageant and who cares if you're entering middle age.

This year Marie suggested we give the Dismas twist to the Huron Christmas Carol. Some of the guys at Keele got busy making angels wings and a portable moon. We bought plastic bows and arrows at the Dollar Store for the "wandering hunters (who) heard the hymn". We scrounged some fur coats for rabbit skin and then we looked for people to play the holy family.

We asked Dawn if she would be Mary and Keith to be Joseph and then we asked Joe if he would be the "radiant boy" Baby Jesus. We wanted Keith a.k.a. Joseph to carry him into the room and place him on Mary's lap with the angels and the hunters looking on.

I admit that in the picture he may look more like a corpse than a bouncing and messianic baby boy, but his entrance in Keith's sturdy arms was the hilarious high point of the play.

It was a comment though, that Joe made when we first asked him to be Baby Jesus that has stuck with me this Christmas. Without missing a beat he quipped, "My name is Jesus, and I'm an alcoholic."

Joe is full of quips but this off the cuff comment had bite. I sensed that he had struck the essential reality of Christmas.

This Christmas Day as we do every Christmas we will read from the Gospel of John "and the Word became flesh and lived among us".

We give this truth a fancy name - incarnation, "embodied in flesh", but when Joe puts it in the classic words of AA, "My name is Jesus and I'm an alcoholic", he startles me with a new picture of God's acceptance of our humanity.

Not even dying between two convicts lies outside the circle of his love.

Not even our half-baked skits can diminish its power.

TWO LOVES UNSEEN

(This post is reprinted from the Weavings: Friends of Dismas Newsletter and written by chaplain Harry Nigh.) 

Winterlude, 1995 and even for Ottawa it was bitterly cold. It had to be minus 28 degrees on the Rideau Canal that night. My friend and I decided to take one last skate late that night before we left for home in the morning. Except for an occasional monitor we were the only ones crazy enough to be out on that steel-cold ice.

I found myself scanning the lights of the homes and the apartment buildings as we skated along. I kept asking myself, "Could they live there ... or there ....or maybe there?"

Less than a year before I had received a liver transplant from a 42 year old man from Ottawa who had died of a brain hemorrhage. Over a period of at least 16 years an auto-immune disease had slowly destroyed my liver. Then out of the blue just before Easter, I received the call that a family had offered their loved one's organ and I was given my life back. All that we knew was that they lived in Ottawa.

It was totally emotional and unrealistic, of course - receiving a transplant is a roller-coaster of emotions, especially a gratitude that always takes me to tears - but I wondered if the family that had granted me that awful gift could be living in one of these lighted buildings. I was aware of a heart-felt closeness to them as we skated on the canal that night.

I would have loved to have met them to try to express my gratitude personally, but that was not possible. We could only send our thank you letters anonymously... and imagine who they might be.

So something resonated in me when I came across these words written to the early churches in 1 Peter 1: 8, "Although you have not seen him you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him..."

That's what I was feeling on the Canal that night. This ancient writer giving thanks for the offering of God's love in Jesus, "who emptied himself ... and became obedient to the point of death..."(Philippians 2: 7ff) was speaking the grateful language of a transplant recipient!

During his "Jesus period" Bob Dylan sang, "For all those who have eyes / and all those who have ears / It is only He who can reduce me to tears."

Many of you who walk alongside men and women coming back from prison speak of your gratitude for the people you have come to know. You tell me that in them, and in the unlikeliest of places, you have seen our Lord.

It's the profound enigma of Easter that He whom we have not seen can be known and loved for all those who have eyes and all those who have ears."