By Revd Dr James Tebbutt, District Chair
Reading: John 1 v. 14
Notes:
Happy Christmas! – A heartfelt greeting that we share together, formed through happy Christmases gone by, renewed in this year’s reconnection with and celebration of Christ’s birth, and encapsulating our continued hope for the redemption and rebirth of the world.
How vital that hope is! Not all our past Christmases were happy: loss and heartache can break in to impact or overwhelm us, while this Christmas too will not remove the persistent needs and wants, hatred or oppression, which are presently suffered by so many.
Yet Christmas, both its immediate gifts and its promise of restoration, is rooted in and reminds us of when “the Word became flesh”, when the full expression of God made his “home amongst us”, not abandoning but suffering for and with us. In Jesus was seen God’s glory; even as now, in a midnight communion or morning service, in the wonder on a child’s face, or in love and goodness rekindled within us, we can sense, we can glimpse in each glint, something of God’s glory, God’s nature, God’s purpose.
For in that glory there is “grace and truth”, and a light – the Christ life-light – that brings life (or, if your prefer, life which brings light) into the world: light for the darkness, hope for despair, and fire to inflame our hearts to seek God’s ways, God’s reconciliation, for us and for all – a blessèd Christmas, then, now, and more fully yet to be.
Wonder:
Where do you glimpse God’s glory, grace and truth, this day; where do you sense, or where might Christ’s life-light be, this Christmas?
What might enable that life-light to be released and realised for others, near and far, especially where human misery and cruelty is at its worst, where innocence and innocents are destroyed?
Prayer:
Loving and incarnate God, thank you for the gift of Jesus, and for the hope that your Word, present now through the Holy Spirit, brings to the world, to lighten our darkness and lead us into life. Thank you for Christmas, past, present and future, feeding body, mind and spirit. Be with us, especially with those most in need this day. Wherever Christmas, past or present, is painful, may your peace and restoration enable us to behold, and to be held within, your glory, truth and grace. Amen.