And is this what he brought it back for?Trump saved Christmas. pic.twitter.com/bmeUnnBoFr
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 24, 2024
Tuberville’s as sharp as a bar of soap.🧼Trump’s annual Christmas message this year features taking over Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, while condemning “radical left lunatics.” What better way to commemorate the birth of Jesus? pic.twitter.com/dwxgljlKXU
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 25, 2024
We also have a HUGE national shortage of construction workers, agricultural workers and food processors, landscapers, and hospitality workers. But he wants all of them all deported as not useful, while justifying migrants in his industries. pic.twitter.com/giIaqzczMl
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 26, 2024
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024
A Democratic congresswoman tried to make sense of Donald Trump's recent threats over the Panama Canal. https://t.co/yPQHqkh92z
— Raw Story (@RawStory) December 26, 2024
"The Belt and Road Initiative that China has engaged in is something that – you know, I have traveled the globe with my colleagues and met with military leaders," Wasserman Schultz said. "It is real, it is a real issue. But what we need to do is make sure that we strengthen our relationships with our with our allies and treaty partners like Panama, not make ridiculous carnival barker threats like buying Greenland, which isn't for sale and we're not going to acquire, and invading Panama to take back the canal. There's been a drought in Panama, and so it has been, it has slowed passage of ships. But what Donald Trump is really trying to do here is try to get better fees for passage for his corporate and billionaire allies. That's what this boils down to, and it's preposterous."History lesson:
The negotiators decided that their best chance for ratification was to submit two treaties to the U.S. Senate. The first, called The Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal, or the Neutrality Treaty, stated that the United States could use its military to defend the Panama Canal against any threat to its neutrality, thus allowing perpetual U.S. usage of the Canal. The second, called The Panama Canal Treaty, stated that the Panama Canal Zone would cease to exist on October 1, 1979, and the Canal itself would be turned over to the Panamanians on December 31, 1999. These two treaties were signed on September 7, 1977.So we can enforce the neutrality of the canal, to keep it open for all. What we can’t do is determine the fees for using it. Or control the weather.
"I mean, Greenland, Panama, Canada? No one saw any of this coming because this is what Donald Trump does –– he stirs chaos," he admitted. "It has strategic value for him because it distracts from other things he doesn't want to be talking about, but sometimes it just seems completely bizarre and made up."
"None of this makes any sense," he confessed. "And I think what it signals is that we're back to the Donald Trump that we knew in his first term, which is he wakes up every day and just stirs chaotic, bizarre things and drives the news with that."Distraction (currently, from reports on the influence of Elmo) and driving the news are pretty much all Trump knows. The chaos is just a consequence of his complete incompetence.
Happy Christmas Day. Trump announces that Kevin Cabrera will be the US Ambassador to Panama, a “country that is ripping us off on the Panama Canal, far beyond their wildest dreams”."Us” is not the United States. We the taxpayers don’t pay the fees for using the canal. Shippers do. “Us” is the billionaire mice in Trump’s pocket.
54 When they heard these things, they became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen. 55 But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. 56 “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” 57 But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. 58 Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. 59 While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” 60 Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died. (Acts 7:54-60)
The carol was written for the Feast of St Stephen, better known as Boxing Day. And it celebrates the long tradition of charitable giving on the Second Day of Christmas.
Duke, martyr, and patron of Bohemia, born probably 903; died at Alt-Bunzlau, 28 September, 935.There's a surprising amount of death on the Christian calendar after the celebration of the birth of the Christ-child. It's almost a reminder that "peace on earth, goodwill toward" all, is not so much a gift as a hope that we have some part in. But our part is active, not just passive.
His parents were Duke Wratislaw, a Christian, and Dragomir, a heathen. He received a good Christian education from his grandmother (St. Ludmilla) and at Budweis. After the death of Wratislaw, Dragomir, acting as regent, opposed Christianity, and Wenceslaus, being urged by the people, took the reins of government. He placed his duchy under the protection of Germany, introduced German priests, and favoured the Latin rite instead of the old Slavic, which had gone into disuse in many places for want of priests. Wenceslaus had taken the vow of virginity and was known for his virtues. The Emperor Otto I conferred on him the regal dignity and title. For religious and national motives, and at the instigation of Dragomir, Wenceslaus was murdered by his brother Boleslaw. The body, hacked to pieces, was buried at the place of murder, but three years later Boleslaw, having repented of his deed, ordered its translation to the Church of St. Vitus in Prague. The gathering of his relics is noted in the calendars on 27 June, their translation on 4 March; his feast is celebrated on 28 September.
I used this in lieu of a sermon for my very first Christmas Day Service (in the end I only ever did two Xmas Day services both in that small country church of truly wonderful people). Nobody really cared about the sermon; they were there for the hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls. which even the "liberal" UCC was afraid I would call "communion." No matter; a splendid time was had by all.
I'm not doing a sermon this year on Christmas Day either; but I can still offer you this:
The World in a Bowl of Soup
by Annie Dillard
Once there was a great feast held in a banquet hall of such enormous proportions that you could not believe men built such a thing. Two thousand chandeliers hung from the ceiling: lumber cut from all the world’s forests made the walls and parti-color floor. Great loose areas of the hall were given to various activities: there were dances and many kinds of gaming: a corner was devoted to the sick and injured, and another to the weaving of cloth. Children chanted rhymes wherever they gathered, and young men sought pretty girls in greenhouses or behind the damask hangings of booths and stalls.
The feast lasted all night long. Guests sat at a table as long as a river that stretched down the middle of the hall. No one cloth could cover such a table, nor could one centerpiece suffice. So the table was decorated in hundreds of different themes, with different combinations of colors and kinds of tableware, with various carved figures and various drinks, and with lively musicians in costume playing to each set of guests a special music.
There was only a single course served to the guests, but that was a soup made of so many ingredients it seemed to contain all other dishes. The soup was served continuously, all night long, and there were so many guests that all the places at the table were always taken, and the benches always full, when the servants ladled the soup into the endlessly decorated array of metal, glass, wood, and pottery bowls.
***
Now, the host of this feast was a young man of tremendous wealth and power who stood behind a curtain on a balcony above the great hall and watched the guests as they ate and drank at the long table. He thought: “All night long people have been eating as much soup as they wanted and then coming back to the table for more. It is good that they enjoy themselves. But not one person has seen or really understood the excellence of that soup.”
So the host parted the curtain a crack more and let his gaze fall. It fell directly on an old man who happened to be sitting at the table in his line of vision, looking about and thinking of nothing at all. At once the old man felt an overwhelming sense of power, an impact as if his spirit had been struck broadside and wakened to a flood of light. He bowed his head and saw, through charged eyes, his bowl of soup that had come alive and was filled to endless depths with wonderful things.
There were green fields in his soup bowl, with carrots growing one by one, in slender rows. As he watched, transfixed, men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots, one by one, out of the soil, and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. He saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in rivers, with dust on the whorled and curly white hair between their ears. He saw tomatoes in kitchen gardens set out as seedlings by women in plaid shirts and by strong-handed men; and he watched the tomatoes as, before his eyes, the light from the sun blew each one up like a balloon. Cells on the root hairs of beans swelled and divided, and squashes grew spotted and striped in the fall. Wine aged in caves, and the barrel maker went home to his wife through sunlight and shade.
He saw the ocean, and he seemed to be in the ocean himself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again he saw the tops of poplars and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks and called, one by one, and flew on.
All these things the old man saw in his soup. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail under his eyes and were replaced by ever more scenes, until, with the flight of wild ducks, the worlds resolved into one blue sky, now streaked, now clear, and, at last, into soup again, dark soup, fragrant in its bowl. The host had let the curtain fall shut.
The man blinked and moved his head from side-to-side. “I see now,” he said to himself, “that this is truly an excellent soup, praise God.” And he ate his bowlful and joined the dancers in a daze, a kind of very energetic daze.
May it be unto you according to your faith. Merry Christmas, and the happiest of holidays, to you and yours.
Christ is born. He is born to us. And, He is born today. For Christmas is not merely a day like every other day. It is a day made holy and special by a sacred mystery. It is not merely another day in the weary round of time. Today, eternity enters into time, and time, sanctified, is caught up into eternity. Today, Christ, the eternal Word of the Father, who was in the beginning with the Father, in whom all things were made, by whom all things consist, enters into the world which he created in order to reclaim souls who had forgotten their identity. Therefore, the church exults, as the angels come down to announce not merely an old thing which happened long ago, but a new thing which happens today. For today, God the Father makes all things new, in his divine Son, our redeemer, according to his words: ecce nova facio omnia.
Therefore, the church on earth joins with the church in heaven to sing one same song, the new song, the canticum novum which the propeht commanded all to sing after the world should be been redeemed by the Christ, whoc ancestor he knew, by revelation, that he should be. When David cried out: "Sing to the Lord a new song" he was the first precentor to intone the songs the church would sing on this day in her liturgy, as she announces to the whole world salvation and joy. For as St. Leo says: "Today there has shone upon us a day of new redemption, a day restoring that which was lost, a day of bliss unending."
--Thomas Merton
Come, then, let us observe the feast. Come, and we shall commemorate a festival; but truly wondrous is the whole chronicle of the nativity. For this day the ancient slavery is ended; the devil confounded; the demons take to flight; the power of death is broken; paradise is unlocked, the curse is taken away, sins is removed from us, error driven out, truth has been brought back, the speech of kindliness diffused, and spreads on every side, a heavenly way of life has been implanted upon the earth, angels communicate with men without fear, and men how hold speech with angels.
Why is this? Because God is now on earth,, and man in heaven; on every side things commingle. He has come on earth, while being whole in heaven; and while complete in heaven, he is without diminution on earth. Though he was God, he became man; not denying himself to be God. Though being the impassable Word, he became flesh; that he might dwell amongst us. He became flesh. He did not become God. He was God. Wherefore he became flesh, so that he whom heaven did not contain, a manger wouild this day receive. He was placed in a manger, so that he, by whom all things are nourished, may receive an infant's food from his virgin mother. So, the father of all ages, as an infant at the breast, nestles in the virginal arms. that the magi may more easily see him.
--John Chrysostom, fifth century
There is nothing I can give you, which you have not; But there is much, very much, that while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within reach, is joy. There is a radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see, and to see we have only to look. I beseech you to look. Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly, or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me that angel's hand is there; the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Our joys too: be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts. And so, at this time, I greet you. Not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you now and forever, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away.--Fra Giovanni, 1513
I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence ... We all went out ... and just stood listening ... All I'd heard for two months ... was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets, ... machinegun fire and distant German voices. But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted 'Merry Christmas', even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war.The words of Alfred Anderson, "last living veteran who'd been present at the 1914 Christmas Truce."
Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-beloved imprisonment.
There he hath made himself to his intent
Weak enough, now into our world to come.
But O! for thee, for Him, hath th’ inn no room? 5
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from th’ orient,
Stars, and wise men will travel to prevent
The effects of Herod’s jealous general doom.
See’st thou, my soul, with thy faith’s eye, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.
--John Donne
Well, the CIA made sure liberation theology died in Latin America, mostly because “God’s preferential option for the poor” was seen as Marxism, or near enough for dammit.* And also because liberation theology advocated “a radical restructuring of society.”The mix of hope, drive for success and belief in a God who rewards faith, sometimes with financial accomplishments, has become dominant across the United States and Latin America, experts on Latino religion say. https://t.co/csn9qq67x7
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 24, 2024
Some things never change.Merry Christmas Eve everyone!!
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) December 24, 2024
It’s the last Christmas under Democrat Communist control.
Freedom is coming! 🇺🇸
Archbishop of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan said in a Fox News interview that thrice married, twice divorce, adjudicated rapist and serial liar Donald Trump “takes his Christian faith seriously.”
“I’ve had talks with him before in the past where he’s pretty blunt about, you know, he can’t say that he was raised as a, as a very zealous Christian, but he takes his Christian faith seriously,” Dolan told host Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in a clip highlighted by The Hill.
Dolan also claimed divine intervention saved Trump from assassination this summer.
“I think of Ronald Reagan and John Paul II,” Dolan said. “Both survived assassination attempts very close to one another, and when the two of them met for the first time, Ronald Reagan said to Pope Saint John Paul II, ‘Mother Teresa told me that she thinks the Lord spared me, because the Lord has somethin’ special in mind for me.’”
“And Pope Saint John Paul II smiled and said, ‘She told me the same thing,’” he added.I’m sure somewhere in the afterlife the shade of William F. Buckley is looking on contentedly. Because at least nobody’s taking the gospel too seriously.
