Let Your Love-Light Shine

The story goes in Matthew that there was an anomaly in the sky, something ajar.  More than a shooting star caught their attention.  In a world beset by a great malaise, a wonder to behold. 

In that “bleak midwinter frosty wind made moan.”  And moans yet today in the souls of the dispossessed.  A very bleak midwinter for those on the streets or sleeping in their cars.

Let me tell you of one such woman, a woman who works at a tough, thankless job and yet found herself and her family homeless.  Priced out of her apartment in Atlanta, Georgia.

Cokethia Goodman and her children have been homeless for several months when the author of Working and Homeless in America[1], Brian Goldstone, came upon her.

The road to ruin began when she noticed a letter from the landlord in her mailbox on the afternoon of August 2018.  The terse letter informed her that the property had been sold and that she would have to move out. 

She and her children had lived in that quiet Atlanta neighborhood over the past year.  The apartment was near her kids’ schools and a nice playground.

That was it.  The property had been sold and her lease would not be renewed.  Time to cash out in this gentrifying neighborhood.

After frantically looking for anything nearby, she settled in a dilapidated dump in Forest Park, on the city’s outskirts.  A dump, and for $50 more a month.

After two weeks in the place, she heard a scream from her twelve-year-old son.  Running the water, he had received a bad electrical shock.  She called code enforcement and the place was condemned.  The family was without housing again.  Nowhere left to go.  For a while they holed up in a squalid hotel, but soon couldn’t afford that.

All the time she was working fulltime as a home health aide.  She was working, doing everything she was supposed to do and they were out on the streets.  How could this be?  She thought homelessness and a job were mutually exclusive.  This didn’t add up.

In her job she had been taking care of men and women in her city of Atlanta, and now she and her kids were homeless?  There she was in her blue scrubs checking to see if any of the shelters had room for her and her children.[2]

This is America, for God’s sake!  The wealthiest nation in the world and this is how we reward people who play by the rules and do everything in their power to support themselves?

Jesus, let your love light shine down on this humbled family.  Let the Epiphany Star of Promise shine down on Cokethia and her children.

It is a bleary, depressing landscape over which the Epiphany Star will shine in many of our cities and in our rural areas.

The citizens of Willows, California, are in a state of shock as the only medical center for miles and miles around is being forced to close.  Yes, that “One Big Beautiful Bill” has done them in.

Like countless other small rural communities, Willows has lost its only medical care facility.  Glenn Medical Center in Willows closed Oct. 21 after losing “critical access” status for being 3 miles closer to the nearest hospital than rules require.

This rural outpost has treated residents wounded in accidents along with countless victims of car crashes on nearby Interstate 5 and a surprising number of crop-duster pilots — all done on Oct. 21

As hospital staff carted away medical equipment from emptied patient rooms, Theresa McNabb, 74, roused herself and painstakingly applied make-up for the first time in weeks.

“’I feel a little anxiety,’ McNabb said. She was still taking multiple intravenous antibiotics for the massive infection that had almost killed her, was unsteady on her feet and was unsure how she was going to manage shopping and cooking food for herself once she returned to her apartment after six weeks in the hospital.”[3]

This was in a county that voted over 60% for Trump.  What did they expect when Johnson and his marauders cut over $900 billion out of Medicare.  That’s Billion with a capital B.  And slashed Medicaid payments to the states by hundreds of millions?

Oh, that the Light of Epiphany might brighten our wits to understand that elections have consequences.  The Orange Felon has done exactly what he said he would do – slash government to the bone.  Except for his rich buddies and fellow grifters.  And your New Year’s present?  Exploding health premiums.  But no sweat for Congress – they’re on extended vacation and have wonderful taxpayer-supported, gold-plated health care.

Jesus, let your Love Light shine on those abandoned folks in Willows, California.  Let your Light of Compassion and Enlightenment shine on their choices this coming November.  Let it shine!

Dr. King reminds us that we’re all part of an “inescapable network of mutuality” where one person’s fate is tied to that of everyone.  As American citizens we have a shared destiny.

We learned this in our churches, our mosques, our temples and in our synagogues.  Now, let’s vote like it.  Take your concern, prayers and thoughts right into the polling place.  Be the Light!

Jesus, Let your Love-Light shine in our politics, the darkest of places right now.

Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG) has had an epiphany.  A Damascus Road Moment.  Maybe so the residents of Willows, California.  Rugged individualism is a lie, not the ethic of the Jesus Movement.[4]

MTG had gone so far as to accuse Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of treasonous conduct, adding that treason was punishable by imprisonment or death. 

After the death of Charlie Kirk, she has now suddenly lost all appetite for vengeance. She later told a friend, who confirmed the exchange: “After Charlie died, I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”[5]

Jesus, let your Love-Light shine on Marjorie Taylor Green and her spiritual awakening. 

Sister Simone Campbell, the lead Nun on the Bus of several years ago has a new book out on the spirituality that undergirds her work and helps her be fit for human consumption.

Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, notes in her Forward, “If there’s one governing mantra of Simone’s life, it is this: get in there close with people on the margins of society and allow your heart to be broken open.  It’s in the breaking open to raw human need of real people that is for Simone the fire at the heart of her passion for justice.”[6]

Sister Simone is a splinter of this Epiphany Love-Light.  Her recent book will be our Lenten study if I can find enough copies.

The Epiphany Star reveals reality to us.  As it revealed the Christ Child to the traveling sages, it also revealed through a dream the wicked intent of Herod.

The Love-Light of that star also reveals bitter reality, past and present, but also reveals those merciful souls who acknowledge the wrongs of their people and in some small way make amends.

Timothy Snyder, in his book, On Freedom,[7] tells the story of taking his children to school in Vienna, Austria.  While they waited for the bus for kindergarten, his son became fascinated by the construction machines operating across the street.

As the workers spread new asphalt for the sidewalk, they were preparing to install Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones.”  These are markers denoting the houses where Jews once lived before the Holocaust.

“The information they carry – names, addresses, sites of death – give us a chance to rehumanize, to restore, at least in imagination, what they lost”[8]

“Before the Jews were killed, they were stripped of everything: first their property, then their clothes.”[9]

Jesus, let your Love-Light enfold those repentant souls willing to acknowledge the past.  Let it gently shine and embolden.  Embolden historians like Timothy Snider who are willing to write the truth that it may warn us of what we are capable of in the future.

May we in America have the same courage to acknowledge the dark moments of our past where we have inflicted incredible suffering.

Let your Love-Light shine on our willingness to make amends and move forward in to this eternal Light of Promise, the Light of a New Day.

If you have a chance, catch Rachel Maddow’s new podcast, “Burn Order.”  It’s about our roundup and incarceration of thousands of American citizens solely because of race – our Japanese-Americans.  Folks who had absolutely nothing to do with Pearl Harbor.  These citizens lost virtually everything.  New evidence shows the underlying avarice of those wanting their farms that was behind the racist accusations of treason.

On her recent program introducing this podcast, Rachel had three Japanese-American scholars, some who had been incarcerated in these camps.  This truth-telling is Love-Light brightly shining.  Jesus, let your Love-Light shine on Rachel and all intrepid reporters who would inform us on what is really going down in 2026.

Jesus, keep your Love-Light shining that we learn from our past, the good and the bad.  Keep your Love-Light shining on those stalwart souls who continue to forge a better way forward.  And warn of dangerous curves ahead.

Jesus, keep you Love-Light shining on those who would be victimized by the worst of us – for our Somali immigrants, for the Haitians — for the destitute immigrants seeking work at Home Depot stores, for those who can no longer afford the steep, new premium increases for their health care — or even groceries or rent, for God’s sake. 

Jesus, keep your Love=Light shining today, tomorrow and all through 2026, for renewed days of promise and for the Love of God.  Keep it shining.  This we urgently pray.  Amen.

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[1] Brian Goldstone, There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (New York: Crown, 2025).

[2] Ibid, xv-xvii.

[3] Jessica Garrison, “This rural hospital closed, putting lives at risk. Is it the start of a ‘tidal wave’?” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2025.

[4] Robert Draper, “‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump,” New York Times Magazine, December 29, 2025.

[5] Op.cit.

[6] Sr. Simone Campbell, Hunger for Hope (New York: Orbis Books, 2020), Forward by Sr. Helen Prejean, ix.

[7]Timothy Snyder, On Freedom (New York, Crown, 2024), 24.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

January 4, 2026

Epiphany Sunday

Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14
Ephesians 3:1-12; Gospel: Matthew 2:1-12

“Let Your Love-Light Shine”