Christmas is coming! The cultural celebration is well underway. Stores are full of Christmas decorations and potential presents. Radio stations are already several weeks into playing Christmas songs 24/7. Retailers have begun slashing prices for last-minute Christmas shopping - what they hope will be some binge buying. Soon the festive, and sometimes frantic, round of holiday parties will begin. This is cultural Christmas in America.

Of course, Christmas is also a religious holiday. The Christian Church's observance of the season really happens in two parts. Advent starts this Sunday. Its four week journey helps us get ready in heart and mind to receive the Christmas child once again. Christmas itself is too often a time of recovering from the feasting, festing, and shopping of the cultural Christmas celebration (described in the first paragraph above). O it can be a quieter time, a time of contemplating the amazing gift of realizing that God is indeed with us.

The Christian Church has committed itself over the centuries to preserve the story of Jesus with its implications for all of us. This larger story has been memorialized in institution and practice. And so it continues to be alive and vital for believers even 2,000 years after Jesus lived. In this Advent-Christmas season, the Christ child once again comes to be with us and we are blessed and reborn by his presence

As churches, our Christmas observance is really more focused on Christ as Immanuel, God with us. Historically, we don't know for sure when and where Jesus was born. But we do know that the human being Jesus of Nazareth was actually born. His birth was an event in history even if it was not recorded. And his life changed the world. This year, I am finding a very powerful sense of meaning that we can find common ground in Jesus' very human life. This common ground is our shared humanity. As the cycle of birth and death, growth and decline, continues even through these holidays, God is indeed with us at the very core of whatever it is that makes us human. This presence reminds us that we are also divine.   God is with each of us and this is very good news!

Thanks for continuing to bless me as we journey together.
  
Jack Price

Return to the Enotes index