Can we cancel Christmas this year?

Can we cancel Christmas this year?

I don’t know about you, but I am just not in the mood.

A week before Christmas, innocent Australian children are killed in the most innocuous of settings – jumping on an inflatable bouncy castle at school.

Random Greek letters have become household terms as they refer to variants of a virus which has spun out of control. The latest, Omicron, is causing hearts around the world to plummet as case numbers rise. Indeed, in some parts of the world, headlines declare ‘Christmas Cancelled’ in response to lockdown measures. Again.

Meanwhile, pandemic or not, refugees around the globe flee war, starvation and despair. But where can they go?

Can we cancel Christmas this year?

The First Christmas

A sweet newborn
Innocence personified
A special star
Proclaims the birth of a king

Yet the promised Saviour was born into a uncertain messy world.

Within a year or so, the family of this Christmas child would flee in the middle of the night, taking nothing beyond what they could carry.

Refugees. You rarely see them on Christmas cards.

Last week, our simple English Bible study group studied the tale of the wise men. We used Christmas cards to illustrate the story. This week we are expecting to study the tale of King Herod’s order to kill all baby boys in the area.

I don’t want to do it. It’s too horrible. But it, too, is part of the Christmas story.

Hope

The ‘Prince of Peace’ was born that first Christmas (Isaiah 9:6).

His life in first century Israel would be anything but peaceful, culminating in crucifixion.

But death was not the end.

The Apostle Paul put it like this:

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Colossians 1:19-20 NIV

Peace on the cross? Is not that an oxymoron?

Over and over in the Bible, we find precious promises of peace … but not many of comfort. Consider the encouragement of the Christmas child himself, by then grown up, to those who would follow him.

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.

John 16:33 NIV

Can we cancel Christmas this year?

No.

(Though we can tone down the glitz and glitter.)

We need hope. We need a reason to lift our eyes above the chaos and confusion around us. We need reassurance that there is a God out there who not only knows how messy our world is, but who stepped in to do something about it.

We live in an era of ‘now and not yet’. We live with hope … hope that was given flesh and laid in a manger that first Christmas.

And so we sing, whether or not we are ‘in the mood’:

O little town of Bethlehem,
how still we see thee lie!

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
the silent stars go by;

Yet in thy dark streets shineth
the everlasting light.

The hopes and fears of all the years
are met in thee tonight.

Philip Brooks, 1868, Public Domain