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Dear Friends,
"If you take Christ out of Christmas - all that is left is M&S!"
When I read this I thought how true for many people this Christmas! We do often talk of Christmas becoming more of a material celebration each year and is not M&S the favourite haunt of many at Christmas time?
We as Christians often deplore the materialistic nature of contemporary Christmas but when all is said and done it has to be said that for Christians, material is and should be what Christmas is all about!
It is fundamental to our Christian belief that God came to earth, to us, in material - namely in the life of the man called Jesus of Nazareth.
The theological word for this is "incarnation" which means "in the flesh".
This was not God masquerading as a human being - or some phantom - this was God in material - a human life formed in the womb of a young Palestinian girl, borne for nine months until in the pain of labour and through childbirth he emerges, just as you and I have done, into this material human world.
He came as a human being who could be emotionally and psychologically strained by temptations, who wept at the death of his friend Lazarus, whose faith was stretched in Gethsemane and who felt the agony of suffering in the crucifixion.
And this human life really dies - heart stops beating - lungs stop breathing - as all human lives do.
". . . So the word became flesh and dwelt among us . . ." which literally means "He came and pitched his tent in our camp beside us."
We are the ones who cause the separation, but He comes to bring reconciliation by experiencing our human life. God enters into the material so that we should enter the bright, wonderful and lovely world of spiritual hope.
So may I wish you all a thoroughly material Christmas - but in the Christian sense!
Joy and peace this Christmas-tide!
Caryl
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