The Hope of Christmas!

This morning when I opened my email I was shocked by the contents of one particular email. It was a review of the tragic events of 2016. Some of the headlines read:

Orlando Nightclub Shooting Worse in U.S. History

Dallas Sniper Kills 5 Officers

The Tragedy in Aleppo

Chicago Tops 700 Homicides

84 killed by Trucker in France on Bastille Day Tragedy

These are just a few of the many headlines recapping a tumultuous year.  Space will not allow me to post more tragic stories but as you know there are many more I could have cited.

Christmas is right around the corner.

In fact, churches all across America have been celebrating the Advent Season in preparation for the birth of Jesus. Each Sunday an Advent candle is lit as Christians around the world cast their eyes upon what God is about to do in the birth of his only Son.

Christmas is the season of hope.

It is the season in which Christians resist the temptation to cave in to hopeless resignation.

In truth, 2016 is not the worse year the world has ever experienced; it just feels like it because of the access to media coverage that we are exposed to each and every day. 

But it is bad enough and if we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the many tragic stories of this past year then we will have given up on the hope of Christmas. And resigned ourselves to living in fear.

While the world spends itself foolish this Christmas season in its annual consumer binge the message of the Savior’s birth gets tragically lost. In other words, the true meaning of Christmas gets covered over in layers of secular sediment and shallow customs that totally miss the point of Christmas altogether:  

Christmas is when God came into this world to reside with us!

The early Christians, especially those who wrote about it in what has come to be known as the Gospels believed that God took up residence on earth in the person of that baby boy named Jesus. 

Theologians refer to this event as the “Incarnation” or the “embodiment” of  God in Jesus.

John wrote about this in his Gospel: 

The Word became flesh and blood,

and moved into the neighborhood.

We saw the glory with our own eyes,

the one-of-a-kind glory,

like Father, like Son,

Generous inside and out,

true from start to finish (The Message).

God is now onboard, declares John. He has not created the world and abandoned it to fate or to senseless tragedies. He is right here with us.

When Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus they are not just celebrating the birth of a cute little baby coming into this dangerous world, they are celebrating the birth of God in the flesh! If I may be so crass to say that in the birth of Jesus God took the bull by the horns.

God is not some detached “Sky God” that we hope is consciously aware of the tragedies we experience in life. 

Many years after Jesus’s birth a man named Paul reflected on the significance of this birth and shared his thoughts with several secular philosophers in Athens. Here is how he put it:

“For in him we live and move and have our being.”

Yes the mystics believed that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

He is actively present in our lives. Now this doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the pain of tragedy when it comes into our lives. We are human. Tragedy is disruptive and painful for sure.

But we live with real hope, born on that first Christmas Day, that God is in our midst even today as he loves us towards eternity. He has provided us the Comforter (Holy Spirit) to sooth our anxieties and fears.

We are not alone no matter how lonely we may feel at any given time!

Now here’s the point I wish to make:

God has joined us in this life in order that we might join him in bringing his ultimate purpose for creation to fruition. We are God’s agents in a world that has seemingly gone mad. But we do not despair because we know God is the true author of the story that has yet to be completed.

This Christmas, as in every Christmas, I discover something quite special: The birth of a child some 2016 years ago offers me incredible hope for the future. 

However you choose to celebrate Christmas this year do so knowing that hope is alive and well.  The birth of Jesus is the beginning of the world’s only true hope.