Interfaith Celebration of Light

...for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Ex 22:21)

Monday night CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice), along with the Progressive Jewish Alliance and labor leaders met at Powell and Geary, on Union Square, for the Interfaith Celebration of Light. I joined the faith and labor leaders gathered to hear speakers from across the our communities, a performance artist, and representatives from several unions. We heard speakers demanding respect and dignity for those who work in our city, supporting public education, and our need to be the light of hope to the nameless and forgotten living mere blocks from Union Square. We sang freedom songs of Woody Guthrie. At the end of gathering we marched to the Hyatt in support of the hotel workers seeking a contract.

This is the charge I gave to our gathering of fifty plus before we marched to the hotel.

My sisters and brothers, we stand in the midst of the lights of Union Square, the bright and colorful lights of the shops, of the official Christmas tree and the soon to be lit official menorah. All these colorful blinking lights calling us to buy, to spend, to shop and forget the meaning of the lights of the season. These lights around us, remember they are artificial lights, generated by electric power plants. The candles in our hands, that in our hearts, are natural lights. What we have here, sisters and brothers, here in our hands, are the lights of righteousness, the lights of justice. Let us remember what God told Moses: ‘You shall not wrong the stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’. Let us remind the powers and principalities who dictate to us that we all were strangers in the strange land; we hold our lights of righteousness in our hands.

This is prayer from the Native American prayerbook:

Creator God, maker of all things and all peoples, we walk now in a circle of love and power. Let us be like rays of light, like flowers bright with light, like a great tree mighty in the roots, mighty in the top, that reaches the sky where the leaves catch the light, and sing with that wind song of the circle. Let our life be like the rainbows whose colours teach us unity, Let us, Creator God, follow the great circle, the roundness of power, and be at one with the moon and the sun and the circling ripples of water., shining the lights of righteousness in our world. Amen

On this Feast of the Nativity of Jesus Christ, we remember Emmanuel, God with Us, the savior born in the humble manger, whom in the flight to Egypt was a stranger in a strange land. May we all remember God’s light is in all of us and may we share that light of life to strangers amongst us, now and always, amen.

Merry Christmas! See you at Turk and Lyon!

-eric

as adapted from the Native American Prayerbook.

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