What Should Christmas Mean To Us?

From last Sunday's church bulletin:

Christmas should be every bit as threatening to us as it was to Herod and those who opposed the chance for the world in which they lived to be different.

So often we allow Christmas to be a time of year which affirms everything that we consider to be important to us and to be real.

Things like the ability to give expensive gifts and affirm the wealth that is ours, when God may well want to challenge us about those things which continue to restrain us from welcoming Jesus into our world.

The first and real Christmas story was a decidedly uncomfortable experience for all concerned, especially for those God chose to use to make it a reality. Allow yourself to stay for a while with the thought of suffering sacrifice and painful birth. This is the sort of Christmas the Christian story affirms in Scripture. Let's not dress it up so extravagantly that we can't see the Incarnation for the decorations.