Long after the food is gone. Long after the warmth of gatherings with friends and family has faded. Long after the decorations are dismantled and the lights are out. Even long after the presents are worn out and forgotten.
The real gift of Christmas remains.
Because 2,000 years ago the force behind the universe broke into human history to show us it is pure love. To show us God is with us and for us. And to prove God will not stop until every part of this broken world is restored to good.
That’s what they said. Not that God came just to offer us a better life. Or just to teach us good morals and ethics. Or to make us feel bad about ourselves because we are – let’s face it even on our good days – still kind of messy and broken.
If you follow the story right from the beginning (in the collection of books known today as the Bible) you will read their understanding that the world was created very good by a loving God who intended for us to keep creating and caring for it to keep it all flourishing with God at the centre.
They tell us that we break it when instead of knowing God’s presence and living God’s ways of forgiveness, compassion, justice, humility, and peace we choose our own ways.
And they tell us all of their experiences of this force beyond themselves getting their attention and promising that one day God would set it all back to right. One day God would fix it all. One day God would fill our spaces and lives and earth with the full-on light that only the one who made it all could bring to heal it.
This is what they say the first Christmas is all about. The breaking in to human history of the one who made it. The final answer to their waiting for God to set the world back on track to wholeness. The whole enchilada of God’s presence beginning a full-on, never-stopping, forward-moving invasion of the earth, spreading through every crack and crevice to bring light into the darkness, to heal every wound, to stomp out the corruption and decay and pollution and death that never belonged here in the first place.
To begin the renewal of all things.
Not waiting for us to get our moral ducks in a row. Not holding it over our heads until we get our societal poop in a group. Not humiliating us in our individual failures, our family dysfunction, and our national and global examples of how far our deficiencies can go to deteriorate a flourishing world, but arriving in the midst of them. Coming to us because of them. Seeing and knowing our need for a healing touch, and meeting us right smack dab in the middle of the mess. To invite us to more.
This is the gift that remains.
God is with us. God is for you. God loves you. And God wants to meet you right in the midst of it all.
So you would know the touch and plan of the one who is making all things new.
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Melanie Koch Nichol serves as youth centre director at Youth Unlimited/YFC North Perth.
