Hello, Church Family and Friends,
It goes without saying that we live in an increasingly high-tech world. We connect with each other through Internet chat rooms, sending text messages on our smartphones. Typing emails has replaced writing letters. When we need advice, we seek out cyber-columnists. We meet each other in cyberspace instead of in real space.
The late Tim Keller was once quoted as saying, “No matter how technologically brilliant we become, if we don’t have empathy, love, compassion and humor, we are lost.” Aren’t we grateful that Christmas introduces the divine notion of a “warm touch” in the midst of this high-tech world? We don’t have to find [email protected] because God is with us. When the angel Gabriel says to Mary, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you,” the angel could be speaking to each one of us. Through Jesus, God is now with us, face-to-face. Our relationship with God is personal because it involves a real live person. So, what are we to make of this marvelous Christmas gift from our loving Lord?
For starters, we can see Jesus as the Word of God in human form. All the messages that God has sent us, through commandments and through prophets, can be understood more completely once we meet Jesus Christ. Jesus arrives as “nothing less than God in human form, coming to ordinary people living in a small town in an average province of the Roman empire — people very much like ourselves” (Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” The New Interpreter’s Bible).
The Christmas gift of Incarnation can also remind us to give of ourselves in the same way God gave of God’s own self. Author Bill McKibben and a group of Methodists in rural New York have begun a movement called the “Two Hundred Dollar Holiday” — in which they ask their families, friends, and fellow church members to limit the amount of money they spend on Christmas to two hundred dollars. Yes, you heard right: two hundred dollars, a mere fraction of the normal American expenditure.
Why are they doing this? “It wasn’t because we wanted a simpler Christmas,” explained McKibben. “It was because we wanted a more joyous Christmas. We were feeling cheated — as if the season didn’t bring with it the happiness we wanted. We were Christians, and we felt that the story of the birth of this small baby who would become our Savior, a story that should be full of giddy joy, could hardly break through to our hearts amid all the rush and fuss of the season.”
Do you remember the climax of that all-time favorite Christmas classic, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas? “And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, ‘How could it be so? It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags!’ And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! ‘Maybe Christmas,’ he thought, ‘doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas . . . perhaps . . . means a little bit more!'”
May the joy of Christ’s birth be born in our hearts,
Bruce Jones, Pastor Imagine Church
