Month: December 2016

A Liturgy for Christmas

May these words speak hope and comfort to you wherever this Christmas finds you…

In the beginning,
God separated light from the darkness,
air from the water,
land from the sea,
and from all of these,
God called forth everything we now know as
“the universe.”
God set into motion the idea of time
and populated the primordial planet with life
from the very simple to the very complex.
And at the pinnacle of this creation
was a creature that united
that which God had initially separated—
a mingling of the earth and the waters
with God’s Holy Breath breathed into its lungs.
Humanity.
Creation’s Caretaker.
Helper to The Holy One.

But Temptation assailed this amalgam creature,
and with it came Sin and Death,
and the culmination of God’s creation,
the being meant to bear God’s Image,
the entity to which all else had been entrusted,
fell.
And all that which God had declared “good” began to decay;
our spirits themselves were defiled due to deceit,
as hereditary heartache took hold,
and that which was intended for eternity
became unbearably and terminally finite.

But all was not lost.

We perceive in the pages of Scripture,
through a past populated by peoples poor and powerless,
through an oppressed nation of shepherds, slaves, and sinners,
God continued to conspire.
The Lord chose agents not based on their own merit
but on that which God would do through them,
and words of hope poured from priests and prophets through the centuries
until,
at their moment of greatest need,
when the Romans ruled,
and the Herods oppressed,
and the Pharisees and Sadducees seethed in the synagogues—
that was when the Light arrived.

Born of a virgin amid whispers of suspicion and hope,
Jesus of Nazareth,
God’s Holy Son,
Fully God and Fully Man,
walked the world that His words had wound
as heaven-born yet human hands healed the helpless,
and His body bore our burdens.
From Cradle to Cross,
His life and death saved us,
that we might know Death no more,
that Sin might become a stranger,
and Temptation little more than a nuisance buzzing in our ears.

The Word dwelt among us,
lived and died and rose again for us,
that these intermingled creatures of earth and water and breath
might behold the greatest Light,
the Light that shines in the Darkness and refuses to be overcome,
that through God’s perfect design,we might become
a New Creation
for a New Beginning.

So hear the Good News this Christmas:
If anyone is in Christ, that one is a new creation.
The old has gone; the new has come!

Christmas Card