Global Manifestation #3: Thoughts and Actions

Remember this bumper sticker? I recall that when I first saw one it made immediate sense.  (H/T E. F. Schumacher.) It did especially as an expression of ecological concern.  This was way before "global warming" or "climate change" became topics.  This was back when we were just learning to reduce our use of styrofoam and "plastic" was clearly on it's slide into a dirty word.

The sentiment is a good one because of how it encourages efforts that would otherwise be stalled by their enormity.  The news about pollution, endangered species, and other dark ecological forecasts is too big for anyone of us to stop.  So we've learned to credit even the smallest actions to reduce damage to the globe.

The most recent is the new campaign to refuse disposable straws in restaurants.  For those of us with moustaches this effort has to be balanced with a likely increase in napkin use.

This global/local concept matters here because of who Jesus was and is as the incarnation of God.  Back when people came to realize that God was up to something big . . . again AND up to something unique, one of the earliest understandings was that the whole world was "implicated."  January 6 has it's place in the Christian calendar to say exactly that.

Stargazers -- think global watchers -- came to Bethlehem to visit and recognize the one of a kind -- think local phenom -- God incarnate.  For Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior the trip was to confirm that a paradigm had shifted.  Why else did that star appear so unusually?  That they were able to recognize HIM meant that their departure wouldn't be by any familiar path.  They were already bound to "another way" home without Herod's idiosyncratic threats.

But sometimes we are the idiosyncrats, afraid like Herod and consumed or at least distracted with local troubles which too easily prevent our global thinking and our participation in God's local actions. 

In Christ, God was thinking globally and acting locally because the world was already "polluted" enough.  God is still acting locally and can through each one of us.  There are still global implications to which we respond, "thanks be to God!"