Christmas Eve and we are caught between frenetic activity, trying to make everything right and a sense of not being able to do anything more. When we are all young children we were usually anticipating the arrival of Santa, but now that we are older, we try to remember when Christmas took on a different meaning.
There are church services, of course, telling us that there is hope for a different kind of world, one in which peace and justice will reign, and for a short time we try to forget the reality of the world around us where there is little justice and certainly no peace.
As we watch old Christmas movies, we start to experience nostalgia for a world that really never existed except in our minds. There are those for which Christmas is a painful reminder of who we have lost – parents, spouses, partners, friends – and we struggle through a façade of joy. As we move from the Eve to the Day, we search for the promise that comes through the birth of a baby that love will triumph in the end.
Prayer for the Day
In the bleak winter sky, we search for hope, O God,
That our anticipation of the coming Christmas is not in vain;
In our hearts we fear that nothing will change, O Lord,
And that the day after tomorrow remains the same.
Awake in us Christmas hope revealed in the birth we celebrate,
Opening to us the possibilities that really do exist
In the name of the One who is the light,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and disturbing world.
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lutheran pastor of Church for All Saints and Sinners
We are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story—the one according to Luke, not Dickens—is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.
Rev. William Willimon, theologian
In those days a decree went out from the Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered …and all went to their own towns to be registered … While they were there, the time came for Mary to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2:1-7, abridged