Jingle tells

I was driving down the road texting away on my I-phone while I waited for Facebook to load and I noticed something: It's Christmas time in the city.

Clearly I haven't been focused lately, what with being suddenly of retirement age and such and having my new best friend I-phone to play with, but somehow I missed Thanksgiving. There were lights flashing, trees standing, dang near everything but carollers carrolling, and somehow it slipped past my eyes until it was in my eyesight.

How have we come to this point. Now, I have become more forgetful in my old age. Just last night I forgot an ecumenical service I was supposed to attend; just forgot. No excuse. I forgot. But how could I forget Thanksgiving. In fact, when was it we voted that Christmas would begin 30 minutes after the candy from Halloween was stored away? Don't remember that vote coming in the mail or anything.

The Bible speaks of this, sort of: In Jeremiah 10 it says: Do not lern the ways of the nations or be terrified by signs in the sky, though the nations are terrified by them. For the customs of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel. They adorn it with silver and golf; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter. Like a scarecrow in a melon path, their idles cannot speak. They must be carried because they cannot walk. Do not fear them; they can do no harm nor can they do any good.

"No one is like you, O Lord; you are great and your name is mighty in power."

When our idols, our Christmas gift buying and tree decorating and Snoopy flying a blowup plane around blowup presents and you name it, begin to take the place of what is true and what is right and what is meaningful about the Christmas season, which should still be at the most the week or two before the actual date of Dec. 25, we hve a problem. Our idols are trying to speak to us and what most of them are saying is SPEND.

The jingling you hear today isn't the coins in our pockets, for most of us have none. The jingling you hear is the marbles rolling around in our idolistic heads.

The writer of Jeremiah concludes here in this chapter: Tell them this: These gods, who did not make the heavens and the earth will perish from the earth and from under the heavens.

Try writing that into a Christmas card.