When He comes At midnight, He does not Ask a tree; A crèche, A star A candle—Only me.
—Sallie Chesham in Wind Chimes
Whose gifts?
The Christmas season has come to mean the period when the public plays Santa Claus to the merchants.
—John Haynes Holmes in Wisdom in Small Doses
The ultimate contextualization
The gospel must be culturally contextualized, yet it must “gospelize” the cultural context itself. The incarnation is the ultimate event of contextualization. This means that the gospel remains a stumbling block and no contextualization can domesticate it.
—Shoki Coe, quoted by Kosuke Koyama in the Christian Century (July 14–21, 1993)
Our everything
All we could ever imagine, could ever hope for, He is.… He is the Prince of Peace whose first coming has already transformed society but whose second coming will forever establish justice and righteousness. All this, and infinitely more, alive in an impoverished baby in a barn.
That is what Christmas means—to find in a place where you would least expect to find anything you want, everything you could ever want.
—Michael Card in The Promise
He was All
The Christ child is the real model of this “littleness,” this poverty, this nothingness. And yet He was All.
God lacked nothing, but there was just one thing He did not have, did not know about: littleness, weakness. He wanted to experience it in Jesus and there, right there, He showed us the right relationship between creature and Creator.
—Carlo Caretto in Letters to Dolcidia
When history changed
Whether he was born in 4 B.C. or A.D. 6, in Bethlehem or Nazareth, whether there were multitudes of the heavenly host to hymn the glory of it or just Mary and her husband—when the child was born, the whole course of human his tory was changed. That is a truth as unassailable as any truth. Art, music, literature, Western culture itself with all its institutions and Western man’s whole understanding of himself and his world—it is impossible to conceive how differently things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did. And there is a truth beyond that: for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.
While we pray for peace, we need moral clarity about this war.
But let’s not mistake it for calling.
Speech was not God’s only miracle at Pentecost. The Spirit also gave the gift of understanding, overcoming division and contempt.
