Here we stand, 10 days into the new solar year, 7 days past the miracle in a manger, now ready to turn the page on December, close the calendar on 2014. It’s a threshold, a movement away from honoring continuity with the past with gifts and traditions, through a doorway toward self-conscious resolutions and hoped-for newness. What lessons of Christmas will we take into the new year?
We live in a Post-Manger world. Pastors in some of our churches will continue with the Jesus story: the warnings in dreams, the trip to Egypt as a refuge from homeland insecurity, the massacre of all Jewish male children between the ages of 1 and 3 ordered by their king. The dark night in Israel that forced God’s hand to deliver his Son through the womb of a teenage peasant girl, the lowliest of the low, continued for another 30 years while the boy grew into a man, a lifetime for some people. Indeed, the darkness continued after his death three years later and continues to this day.
We are not there in Judea, some of you might say, that flash-point, hot-bed Middle East. We are here in the Tulare Lake Basin, in the central, holy portion, neither on the forested upland slopes with thin soils in the headwaters, nor in the swampy end-point full of tules and cattails. Especially here in the Kaweah’s drainage, we’re in the fertile section of the sweetest, most productive watershed in California.
And it’s not then, you might say, when Caesar and Herod rode roughshod over everything and everyone. It’s now, when we have law and order and a democratic system to keep things functioning properly, an economy that produces the good life for many. It’s not there and then, it’s here and now. What lessons apply?
Water is one. When Caesar built an aqueduct to serve his new city of Caesarea on the coast of Israel, it deprived lands of water in the surrounding countryside and impoverished the peasants who depended on that water for survival. The inability of Tulare County’s Board of Supervisors to come to the aid of those whose wells were drained by the CEMEX mining operation demonstrates that our democratic law and order needs some fine tuning. Citizen participation is needed in 2015.
Land is another. Near the end of his ministry, Jesus warned the daughters of Jerusalem that their good life was coming to an end, that they would be moaning before it was over. The complicity of the Jewish kings and priests with the Romans, forgetting their compact with God and impoverishing their own people, would bring an end to that urban religious fortress. The impetus for the good life that deprives others of life whatsoever won’t be tolerated, Jesus was warning. Inequitable relations between people and land, people and natural resources, people and the good life, result inevitably in destruction.
If that babe in a manger means anything, it is that we must seek judicious distribution of the earth’s resources, must find ways to share the wealth. Here, now in the Tulare Lake Basin and in the entire state, we are ‘way overdue in addressing imbalances of power over water and land, and facing more enormous challenges than ever before. In 2015, let us resolve to take this birth more seriously and bear upon our administrators and representatives the crux of its message.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Methodist Quaker who writes for Tulare County. You can send her your interpretations of the Christmas/New Years threshold c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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