christmas

Christmas is a sacred festival. It is celebration of Christ love for Humankind. And the love that bind us together.

It is a sacred gladness for us to celebrate the holy birth of Jesus Christ.

May we celebrate the sacredness of Christmas with joy, faith and hope.

You may say we made a mistake placing the birth of Jesus on December 25th. Consider this: in 3 B.C., December 25th was the eighth day of Hanukkah, the day when the greatest gift is given.... Early Christians would not have made up the date, or used a pagan festival date...the date was chosen by people who remembered.

From a theological point of view, Easter is the center of the Church year; but Christmas is the most profoundly human feast of faith, because it allows us to feel most deeply the humanity of God. The crib has a unique power to show us what it means to say that God wished to be __mmanuel___ __od with us_, a God whom we may address in intimate language, because he encounters us as a child.

To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of.

After that I went home and Sally put what was left of me to bed; next day, being a Christian family, we saluted the happy morn with the Hell and Hades of a row because I wouldn't get up and go to early service, my sister being quite determined that even if I didn't get up. I shouldn't sleep.

I huddle in the dark with a mass of burnt matches strewn at my feet. And yet, for all of those matches I__e not been able to light a single candle. And huddled in such deep darkness, I__e somehow yet to realize that Christmas made both matches and candles forever obsolete.

The worst defeat of all is to surrender without having been defeated. And it is Christmas that obliterates both.

Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.

The most formidable way to lead is to serve. And while the perplexing oxymoron of such a grinding statement absolutely cripples us, it birthed a Savior.

He gave us taste buds, then filled the world with incredible flavors like chocolate and cinnamon and all the other spices. He gave us eyes to perceive color and then filled the world with a rainbow of shades. He gave us sensitive ears and then filled the world with rhythms and music. Your capacity for enjoyment is evidence of God's love for you. He could have made the world tasteless, colorless, and silent. The Bible says that God "richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment." He didn't have to do it, but he did, because He loves us.

Although it pains me, I must admit that I have never found what I __eed._ And I am in this place because long ago I took it upon myself to decide what I __ant_ to need, verses surrendering to what I __eed_ to need. And thankfully I have realized that God made Christmas everything that I __ant,_ but more so He made it everything that I __eed.

The sure path to tomorrow was plotted in a manger and paved on a cross. And although this sturdy byway is mine for the taking, I have incessantly chosen lesser paths. And maybe it is time to realize that Christmas is a promise that I can walk through the world and never get lost in the woods.

Despite my incessant desperation, I simply cannot paint the perfect picture within which I would wish to live out my life. And because I cannot, God picked up the brush of love, positioned the canvas of history and painted a manger.

Why in the world have we never found what we__e really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won__ accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.

Enjoy the beauty, love and peace of a sacred Christmas.