On the eighth of day of Christmas, the ball drops and a page is turned. Folks in these parts eat pork, catch a football game, or maybe a parade. Desks are cleaned, resolutions drafted, and according to the song, someone gives their true love eight maids a milking. That one never caught on one, but the song did. 

    It’s a silly song, really.

    The sort of song we used to sing on a long trip in a bus or a car to pass the time. The wheels of the bus go round and round. In the end, you’re back to a partridge in pear tree and more stuff than could be sold in a year’s worth of yard sales.

    And yet, the song endures.

    Maybe it’s the way the song captures the immense love that God lavishes on us by sending his Son into the world: Born in a manger, announced to shepherds, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, eating with sinners, and giving his life for the life of the world.

    Or maybe it’s the way the song pictures grace bringing all sorts of creatures and people into the stable: If we can celebrate turtle doves, French hens, leaping lords, bag pipers, and milk maids as Christmas gifts, we might be on our way to celebrating a community where, as Paul says it, immigrants and citizens, rich and poor, men and women all belong in Christ.

   Or maybe it’s the way the song celebrates the joy of a woman who cleans top to bottom and finds her lost coin, or that of a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep and returns a lost lamb, or that of a Father who celebrates the return of his long, lost son home alive again. We can complicate our lives all we want, but every new page, every new year, comes round to turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.

    “There is a time for everything,” we read in Ecclesiastes 3, “and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, …a time to weep and a time laugh, …a time to tear and time to mend,” and each new time, each new year, it says, comes round to a time for love and a time for peace – two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.

    In all that changes, God remains the same.

    Nothing can ever be lost in His love. 

 

    Pastor Skip