On the eighth day after His birth, Mary and Joseph took their newborn son to be circumcised, as was the requirement for Jewish males. During the liturgy of circumcision, the baby boy is named. A “good” name would say something about who the parents prayed their child would become.
I love Christmas Eve. I sense that it is special for you as well. For many of us, it's the first peaceful moment we've had in the past four weeks. Now we come together as family and settle in the pews--and there's a collective sigh of peacefulness.
But there is still a question that must be addressed. The women on the way to the tomb asked it, remember? "Who will move the stone for us?" It occurs to me that the important question today is not "Who moved the stone for Mary?" but rather, "Who will move the stone for us?"
Another new near is upon us; Happy New Year! And if this New Year is anything like those which have come before it, roughly 33 percent of us will be on diets by Monday, and 80 percent of us will have crafted some sort of New Year's Resolution, deciding to change our lives.
One of the best memories of my childhood is attending the Christmas Eve service at the Methodist Church and hearing my mother sing, O Holy Night. I can't tell you how happy I was, when I came back to Hope to find that the Christmas Eve service continues to be a tradition here at First Pres.
The message from the Church is this: Christmas is NOT a day that ends as soon as the wrapping paper is gathered from under the tree. No, Christmas is NOT a day, it is a SEASON. And it does NOT begin in October, it BEGINS after sundown on Christmas Eve.
A man in Somerset County, Vt. apparently intent on suicide, built a cross in his living room and attempted to crucify himself by nailing one of his hands to one side with a 14-penny nail. The unnamed 23-year-old then had a logistical problem....
When I changed my Palm Pilot batteries, I wiped out every event of last year. It was the only record of the things I did - both good and bad - and now it is erased. Likewise the promise to us is, "If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation; the old is gone, the new has come."
Jesus, for those who choose to believe, cannot be contained by something as mundane as a grave. And this is what is at the heart of Easter... the grave cannot contain us either, those of us who believe in the Risen Christ.
In each of the Christmas gospels, we hear a story directed to a particular people who were living in their own particular darkness. Luke’s writing primarily to the people living in the darkness that was the Roman Empire.