DECEMBER 2007

Dear friends,

                  Until recently, it was right after Thanksgiving that merchants began to remind consumers that Christmas was coming.  This year, vendors and radio stations started spreading Christmas cheer by November 1^st!  While most of us are able to see and express that the marketplace has a tremendous influence on our notions of Christmas, it is good to ask yourself, “To what degree do I allow myself to be affected by this?”  If you are anything like me, you allow yourself at least some anxiety about Christmas.  You begin to make a mental shopping list in order to ensure that you spent enough on the right things for people, and you strategically schedule your time from now until Christmas, filling your schedule as full as possible in order to remove any doubt that you did your part to honor this Season.

Christmas did not become a widespread Christian festival until the end of the fourth century.  The Church, up to this point, had placed more emphasis on Jesus’ Resurrection, at Easter, and the coming of the Holy Spirit, observed at Pentecost.  Observing Jesus’ birth on December 25 can be traced to Christians in Africa, around 312 A.D.   On Christmas Day, A.D. 386, John of Antioch observed, “This day . . . brought to us not many years ago, has developed so quickly and borne such fruit.”

Our forebears in faith took the initiative to establish various feasts throughout the year, in order to celebrate the events of Jesus’ life.  Enterprising merchants have seen the opportunity to make Christmas one of their most lucrative times of the year.  Who can blame them!  Keeping a business solvent is no easy task!

Rather than being critical of the commercialism that surrounds us, perhaps we can be thankful for the secular reminder that Christmas is coming and turn it into an opportunity to ponder the meaning of Christmas for 21^st century disciples of Jesus.  Instead of allow ourselves to be influenced by the secular timeline and meaning of Christmas, we can be influential in sharing the importance of God becoming human, like us.  Instead of being thermometers allowing ourselves to be absorbed in secular expressions of Christmas, we can be thermostats, helping people to understand, appreciate and building their lives around the notion that God is with them!

When we give and receive gifts, are they not tokens of God’s great gift to us, in becoming a person like we are, and living among us?  It is not difficult to see how Christmas becomes more about our presents than about God’s presence, the reason we give the gifts in the first place!

Let me challenge you this Christmas season to enjoy God’s presence in a timely manner.  Four Sundays before Christmas begins the season of Advent—a season that expresses the Church’s longing for the coming of Christ in his fullness—the Second Coming; not, as the American commercial community would want us to have it, with preparing for Christmas festivities!  December 25 is the last shopping day before people start going back to the stores with their returns and exchanges.  For Christians, however, December 25 is the first day of the Twelve Days of Christmas (remember the song?).  Then there is the feast of Epiphany on January 6, where we celebrate the visit of the Magi or wise men who came from a distant land to pay homage to Jesus, not in the manger but in the house (Matthew 2:11) where they were staying at the time.  So, it is pretty clear that they brought their gifts to the Christ child quite some time—possibly up to two years (at which time they took flight to Egypt and to return to their land with news of his birth).  And so, we observe the story as it unfolds over time, in order to savor it and to appropriate it into our lives.  You would not spend days preparing a gourmet meal and then sit down and eat it in ten minutes, would you?  

Then why not savor this time of Advent-Christmas-Epiphany?  One of the ways we do this in worship is by setting up the nativity scene in stages:  first the sheep, then the shepherds, then the angels, then Mary and Joseph, and on Christmas eve, the Christ-child.  Then on the Sunday closest to January 6, we add the camels and wise men.  And even though we hear Christmas music on the radio and in stores long before we even get to Thanksgiving, we sing Advent carols during Advent and then sing as many Christmas carols as we can possibly sing during the Sundays in and around the twelve days of Christmas.  And on Epiphany we even sing Epiphany carols—We Three King, The First Noel, etc.

There is time to give some thought as to how your presents can be tokens of God’s presence among us.  Consider the UMCOR Gift Catalog, described in this newsletter.  Think about giving someone your time and attention, or your creative thoughts and abilities!  The possibilities are endless when we really stop to think about what we give to others as an expression of our gratitude for God’s gift of Jesus to us.

May you bless others this Christmas season as God has blessed all of us by becoming one of us!

 Venite . . . Adoremus!

Pastor Mark