Our world’s gasping for life. Desiring more for ourselves, we’ve desolated our forests, seas, rivers, hills, mountains, and air. We’ve chopped down most of our trees. We’ve overfished our oceans and have decimated our coastal ecosystems. We’ve quarried our rivers and hills. We’ve flattened our mountains for gems and minerals. We’ve polluted our waters and air. We’re losing earth’s foundations of life. We’re losing life forms that are the building blocks for the phenomenon of life to continue in our planet.
But we say that all these are for “righteous” reasons. To make us prosper. To free us from what we deem the brutality of living with less.
None is exempt. All of us are guilty. Not content, we hatch depraved schemes to make us better off, even if it means making others worse off. We wage wars and demonize and diminish others. We buy off people and make them suffer the painful loss of self-respect. We subdue and enslave those in need. All for what we say is for “righteous” reasons. For us to live better. To give us the future we want and which we say we deserve. We self-righteously plot to get what we want. We simplify the complex to serve our self-righteous ends. We bask in deeming ourselves kings and queens of mountains that we self-righteously create from piles of bones and rotting corpses of those we’ve despicably discarded to the waysides.
Pride and lustful quests for prestige, pesos, possession, position, and power are a witches’ brew that drive us into self-righteous madness of delusions and decadence. And the world suffers. Our planet and people groan in agony of losing their richness of nature, culture, and of edifying human adventures.
You, me – we’re products of a fallen world. So says our priests and preachers. A world suffering from too much self-righteousness that we so self-righteously advance. And which leads to the world falling even more.
That’s why we so desperately need Christmas. You, me, all of us. Not this Christmas nor any Christmas yet to come. We need the Christmas, the coming of the Christ Child who brings us – for us to have – the righteousness of God. One that heals, not kills. That unites, not disunites. That lifts people up, not put them down. God’s righteousness that mercifully cloaks and cloisters our pompous human self-righteousness. An overpowering righteousness that gives life and sustains life.
We sorely need the Christmas that gifts us God’s righteousness. That gives us hope, peace, joy, and love. That’d brighten our darkened and silenced nights with the Light of a Living and Righteous God being with us, with others, and among us all.
(Inspired by an exposition on Romans 1: 18-24 by Pastor Jason Saito, Mililani Community Church, December 5, 2021)
The exposition was actually along the lines of personal righteousness in one’s individual lifestyles (sexuality, etc.) as shown in the ensuing verses, but I am focusing on morals in our political space. – NWI
