I am so excited—my first Christmas is coming!
This will be my first Christmas with First Presbyterian. Every church has its own style in celebrating Christmas, and I can hardly wait to experience the traditions of this congregation.
One church I served always had a brass ensemble at its Christmas Eve service. I remember a church member who, having attended a service while visiting out of town relatives, came back surprised that people could welcome the baby Jesus without a single trombone.
The choir of another church always put on a madrigal dinner. They brought in a real boar’s head on a platter while singing the “Boars Head Carol” with its Latin chorus: Caput apri defero, Reddens laudes Domino (which means: “The boar’s head I offer, Giving praises to the Lord”). The women in the choir wore beautiful medieval gowns, and the men wore doublets and tights. I joined them in the singing, but escaped the tights by dressing as Friar Tuck.
Another congregation, located in a charming, tree-lined neighborhood, received an annual in-kind offering of food, paper products and mittens, which were then delivered to another Presbyterian congregation serving a neighborhood wracked by poverty, unemployment, drugs and crime. The members of that congregation would distribute them where they knew they were most needed.    Each year an elder from that congregation addressed ours to say thank you, but he did it in such a way that we knew that we were the real beneficiaries of the offering, which gave us a chance to be partners with Christ in his loving outreach to those in need.
Already I can imagine how beautiful in sight and sound our sanctuary will be when we are singing Silent Night over lit candles on Christmas Eve. I wouldn’t want to be any place else.
The feeling of belonging—to Christ, to his church, to his cause, and to each other—is one of the greatest of all Christmas presents. And that is exactly the present we want to share with others this season. Everyone needs hope, everyone needs acceptance, and everyone needs to know Christ, the revealing and reconciling approach of God to the world. Share this present with your neighbors, your co-workers, those you love and – perhaps easiest of all – with casual acquaintances. For starters, you can invite them to be our guests for worship and a light lunch on December 4. They may say they saw something about our church’s invitation through an ad on television or in the paper. And they may very well find that our church is exactly what they are looking for: the place “Where Hope Is Born.”
See you in Church, Stephen