Archive for December, 2010
Smile Pretty!
Family portraits for members and friends are scheduled December 27th & 28th (2:30 – 9:00 p.m.)
for our
2011 Pictorial Directory.
Reserve your time and date today!
MERRY CHRISTMAS
As we ended the Church year with Christ the King Sunday (26th Sunday after Pentecost), we begin our journey to the beginning of a new Church year with Advent. The word ‘advent’ is Latin for ‘a coming or arrival.’ The idea behind it is that God came to an earthly life and lived among us. It’s something to celebrate, rejoice, because just by being in it, God was giving the supreme blessing to the created world. But this birth led to an execution of this same God, by us, on behalf of us, and then the greatest news that death will not end it all. So it’s not something you just go rushing into. We need to take stock of what that baby Jesus was here for. When we go all goo-goo over the baby and the birth, the adult Jesus and His execution are also in sight.
Advent has fallen on hard times. For most people, it’s become a time to get ready for whatever you’re doing with family and friends on Christmas, and not a time to get ready for the Christ child. The bigger Christmas became, the more it swallowed up Advent. In fact, whatever Christmassy thing we think of as being done before Christmas Day is actually done in Advent. In the USA, everything after Thanksgiving is now seen as a part of Christmas. The main problem is not that Christmas intrudes on Advent. The real problem is that people no longer keep their Christmas focus on Christ, and then the Christ-less Christmas zaps Christ from Advent. Practicing Advent as a religious season may help recover Christmas, but it can’t do it by itself. If you don’t look to Jesus every day in every season, you’ll lose Advent, Christmas, Lent, and even Easter. It’ll be a tiring rush, not a loving celebration, and it’ll be about family, or money, or image and not our loving Maker. There are even some who openly advocate letting the world have its Christmas, and then Christians can do their own separate thing on Epiphany. (That would bring them nearly in synch with the old-calendar Orthodox.) But that, of course, chucks Advent as well as Christmas. Christmas is a day of joy, and much of what the non-Christian culture brings to the mix is also full of joy and thus fits well into a Christian context. If you’ve been to RockefellerCenter in New York City, you know how great the decorations can be—the Christmas tree, the lights on the buildings, the large herald angels with their trumpets—all big enough to seem to an adult like the big world appears to a child.
But as you think on that, remember that each Christian has as much right as anyone else to put their stamp on the public culture; that’s an important matter of freedom, and it needs to be exercised or it, too, will be lost. So I challenge each and every one of you to PUT CHRIST BACK IN CHRISTMAS……ONE FAMILY AT A TIME.
God loves you and so do we,
Pastor Ron and Karen & Interns Floyd and Vicky
MERRY CHRISTMAS!