WelCom December 2024/January 2025
A reflection for Christmas
James B Lyons
We’re in the season of getting together. Family members coming home. Friends re-connecting. Christmas!
Think of how you feel as you wait for someone to arrive. I know for myself there’s excitement – a joyfulness about seeing someone again, perhaps after a long time apart. But there’s also a hesitation – will they have changed? Will we still feel the same about each other? What will they think of me?
Then, at the moment of meeting, all the doubts get swallowed up. The friend walks into view and suddenly nothing and no one else matters. You are the only people in the world as you rush to welcome one another.
This is the season of getting together because it’s our holiday season. But our wanting to be together and the expectation of meeting are keys to the understanding of what Christmas is about.
Christmas can easily get displaced by the heavy commercial blanket that drapes over it, but there is still enough Christian DNA in the atmosphere to more than suggest there is something extraordinarily special about this season.
Whatever your opinion of Christmas – your faith, your curiosity, a family tradition – whatever it is, there is also a hope, even a flickering hope, that this is real – that God really has come to be with us – that there IS a power greater than me, that can help me through uncertainty, calm my fears and steer us all to a life of peace, harmony.
For many people religion is not good news. It’s rigid and bitter, and better at dividing than uniting people. Modern-day terrorists promote this, using religion as their cover. Their brutality destroys trust and creates a world where no one is safe.
If you take Christmas seriously, you have a huge part to play in restoring confidence in the gift of God.
Pope Francis, since his election almost 12 years ago, has been living a message of mercy, calling us to recognise that the God who visits us in Jesus Christ, is not a God of condemnation but a God of compassion; one who understands our confusion and our weakness, and who wants to meet with us, walk with us, embrace our hurt, heal us.
He has backed this up in October this year with his fourth encyclical letter. Entitled, He Loved Us (Dilexit Nos),it focuses on the Sacred Heart of Jesus and its relationship to our world – which seems to have lost its heart.
In Christ Jesus we have the assurance that God does not cease in his love for the whole of creation.
Surely, we all want to believe in such a God, but like waiting to meet friends we can start wondering if we’ll measure up and what might be expected of us.
Christmas holds out to us a pregnant maiden full of expectation. From being very afraid, Mary opens her life to the presence of God and gives the world its best and only hope: Jesus, the Christ, the Chosen One – God in human flesh.
This is our answer. God has touched us in the most intimate way possible, by becoming one of us. Some time ago, I read that the future is not predetermined by the mistakes of the past but is waiting to be made. That means we have choices. We can give in to fear and watch everything collapse, or we can embrace the pain of giving birth and be part of the rebuild.
Hold on to the joyful, if hesitant, expectation you felt as you waited for friends to arrive, and in this Christmas encounter with your faith, give thanks for the hope it contains and the love it brings.
Take up Pope Francis’ call to activate our faith and help give a new heart to our broken world. What a Christmas present that would be!
Sing all the world
Sing to the Lord a new song
Sing with full voice.
Shout loud and long in joyful praise
For unto us a child is born.
Sing Mary, sing Joseph
Your dream is fulfilled.
Your doubt and your fear
Melt away in this birth.
Sing shepherds, sing searchers
Who watch and who journey.
Come softly, come humbly
Come home.
Sing all the world a song of joy
Lift weary, troubled hearts.
Sing all creation Christ has come
To love and heal and free.
Sing to the Lord a new song
A new day dawns among us
Sing thanks, sing hope, sing welcome
And glory to God forever.
James B Lyons