Christmas: Hope for All People

Have we forgotten?  In the bustle of activity leading up to Christmas, have we forgotten to prepare for Christ?  In the hurry to celebrate the New Year and take down the decorations, have we forgotten to celebrate our Savior? 

Imagine for a moment the events of Jesus birth: the smell of animals and hay, the sounds of excitement around the birth and the feeling of anticipation from a new mother.  Mary and Joseph were witness to the first moments of our Savior’s life.  To see the first breath taken by the God who breathed the universe into existence.  Before his birth humanity lived under the darkness of the Fall and now the Light had come into the world.  And this Light has become the hope for all nations. 

The Advent and Christmas seasons offer believers time to reflect on the immense importance of the Incarnation, the act of God becoming human.  God humbled himself and became like us in order to save us from our sin.  Not only was he the light of the world, he gave us that light in our baptism and confirmation to spread that hope to the rest of humanity.  In our celebration of Christmas let us remember our call to spread the hope we have found in Christ to the world, a world that has people still living in darkness, which can only be broken with the light of Christ’s love.

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations… There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

You see, each encounter we have with another person is a sharing of the hope we have in Christ.  We, by virtue of the light given to us by Christ, have a choice to share that light or hide it from others.  That choice has eternal consequences.  The Incarnation was a powerful event in the history of the world.  Christ broke through the eternal into the temporal.  He came to dwell among us.  Now we are given the chance to share that light with others so that Christ may dwell among them too. 

This Christmas do not forget to celebrate that hope in our your lives, and share that hope with the people you encounter every day. 

**This article was written for the winter 2010 issue of Today's Disciple (a magazine published by my parent's church in Orlando, FL). 

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