The Peregrinating Parson

 Every year, I write a "Blessing for the Sharing of Light" for the Christmas Eve service at the church I'm serving. This year, I wrote two, but the light was shared virtually because both of our services were held via ZOOM.  I've been thinking a lot this year about the ways that we portray dark and light culturally, which prompted the blessing I used for the early family service. We as a people will only get closer to building the Realm of God when we deal honestly with White Supremacy and all that derives from it or inspires it. One sick inspiration for it is the notion that light is always better than dark; it comes through the metaphor of light=good and dark=evil that was an ancient philosophical and religious idea that was twisted by those whose greed and thirst for power needed an ideological underpinning.  God’s first words were, “Let there be light!” And there was light.   God separated the light from the darkness, making day and night. We are born with a fea

In 2 Kings 5, the commander of the Aramean army, a man named Naaman, suffered “leprosy.” Whether this was the disease now known as Hansen’s Disease, a more virulently contagious skin disease such as impetigo, shingles, or chickenpox, or an autoimmune disease that manifests on the skin, such as psoriasis, eczema, or even pemphigus, is beside the point: in almost every culture of the time, any sign of infection on one’s skin marked one as “unclean.” For what it’s worth, the description later in the chapter of skin “as white as snow” suggests vitiglio, which is thought to be an autoimmune disease and may be heritable, but is definitely not contagious. At the urging of an enslaved girl from Israel, who insisted that a prophet there could heal the general, the King of Aram sent a wealth-laden Naaman to the King of Israel. I suppose the King of Israel was suspicious of this sudden appearance of an enemy general—that would be natural, of course. So rather than acquiescing to the request tha