Now that Christmas 2003 is behind, and the
New Year of our Lord 2004 underway, we can look to the future.
And we can look to the future with renewed hope.
The activities surrounding Christmas, for
the most part, are enjoyable. Even a latter-day Scrooge can have
some fun during the last weeks of December. But the reality of
Christmas -- that the God of the cosmos loves the world so much
that He sends His Son into the world, to be the Savior of the
world -- is deeply renewing. During these early weeks in
January, Christmas grace can begin to sink deeply into our
hearts, minds, and lives. Indeed, the grace of Christmas gives
us new hearts, more hopeful hearts.
This old world can make us calloused and
hard. Problems, personal and societal, persist. People, whom we
think should change, do not change. Most of the time, it seems
like the same-old-same-old. But God’s action in Christmas -- God
becoming flesh, divinity becoming humanity -- shakes us out of
our acquired, learned pessimism and cynicism. If God’s light in
Christmas has truly broken the darkness, we have neither the
right nor the reason to be hopeless.
Let us be clear about this: Christmas
truth does not make us positive thinkers. It does more.
Christmas truth makes us hopeful people. Why? Because always and
everywhere, we can and should hope in what God can accomplish in
His time and in His ways.
The grace and truth of Christmas give us
renewed hope in what God is doing in this world, among us, in
us. Renewal in God’s action leads us to pray with creativity,
insight, fervor, and zeal. And our prayers, motivated by hope,
will result in living that is in conformity with our praying.
That is, our prayers will be the prayers of participants, not
the prayers of spectators.
Made hopeful and active by Christmas, we
need not be intimidated by challenges and problems that will
beset us in the New Year. In renewed hope, with fervent prayer,
and in faithful living, we can face up to all that can harm,
tear down, destroy, and make fearful.
To Zechariah, to Mary, and to the
shepherds, the angels said: "Do not be afraid!"
And to us, the angel says: "Do not be
afraid!" Why? Because Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, is
born. God has become man in history. This is reason for hope,
not fear. Prayer, not worry. Joyful obedience, not desperate
action.
"‘Glory to God in the highest, and on
earth [even in Carteret County, NC] peace among men with whom he
is pleased [even in 2004]!’" (Luke 1:14, RSV)
