The message of the Christmas Gospel is that God is reconciled to this world—with all our imperfections. God does not abandon us, but comes to us.  To me that means that God loves us as we are, but God does not leave us as we are.  And every Christmas, we are invited again to respond to the loving call of God to be different than we have been, and even different than we thought we could be, because God works with us and that changes everything.

Of course, Christmas is a time we like to enjoy and just want to be filled with the mystery and beauty and promise of this night.  But Christmas makes us aware—awake—and giving attention to things other than ourselves.  We must look beyond things as they are to see the power of Christmas to make the world different.

The biggest difference I see is the difference between sentiment and faith. Sentiment looks back at all the other happy Christmases in the past, and fondly loves all those traditions that never change from year to year.  But faith is looking forward in the hope that next Christmas things will be different, not the same:

• that the hungry will not be hungry;
• that there will be far fewer people who are homeless on this night;
• that our soldiers will not be in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else but home;
• that teenagers will not take their own lives in despair because of bullying and violence;
• that families will not be a place of strife and rejection, but of unconditional love;
• that prisoners will not languish without hope or purpose for their lives in a broken criminal justice system.

Can Christmas really change all that, and make the world a better place?  Not really.  But Christ can change everything, if first he changes you and me, and we change how we view God’s world and how we treasure this holy night. 

— Pastor Dan Hooper