Dear friends—

This coming Sunday it’s the Christmas Pageant.  This year, it’s not just the shepherds and the wise men and the angels and the Holy Family, with some sheep and the occasional donkey.  This year, it’s the stars and the planets—and God Herself!—as well as the Holy Family.  The play’s focus is the birth of Jesus as the Savior of the world; God’s willingness to come into the world, to be with us, as a baby whose destiny is to teach us how to love one another as God loves us.

That’s the Christmas lesson as well as the Christmas story.  Our job—and our joy—as followers of Jesus is to show the love of God for the world that needs it more than anything.  Look around you everywhere, and you see and hear the message that we can’t count on others, we have to take care of ourselves, we have to get what we need for ourselves and hang onto it like grim death.  If we need something we can’t get, then we’re to blame for it ourselves.  As the recent candidate for President put it, “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

The message of Jesus is not “thank God for what you have and hold onto it and feel proud of yourself.”  The message of Jesus is what he says to the disciples in the feeding of the five thousand:  “you give them something to eat.”  Put another way, the word we should all say to ourselves every day is the offertory sentence from the Letter to the Hebrews:  “Through Christ let us continually offer to God the sacrifice of praise; that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his Name.  But do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”  Short version:  “thanking God for what I have is important.  But so too is sharing what I am and what I have with others—and not just sharing at the margins but rather at the center.”

Another way to hear it is from the Letter of James:  “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.”

Jesus shows us his love by being willing to live with us in the flesh, even to dying on the cross for our sins.  He asks that we see and feel what his love accomplishes.  He asks that we follow him by loving others as he loves us.  The Christmas miracle is that his love can become real in our lives—making us new, making us his people, making our church a community that has—and shares—new life in his Name.

Come and see the Pageant.  Come and share in the sacrament of Communion.  Come on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and commit yourself to Jesus the Christ as we celebrate his birth.  And join us in the New Year as we live out what it means to love as he does.

Love!  Pat