Looking forward to Christmas !?

Earlier today I met up with Chris and Sarah Keiller. Chris and Sarah are OMF missionaries who are currently on ‘home assignment’ from Thailand. Before they left for Thailand in 2010 Chris and Sarah visited Ballyhenry and since then we as a congregation have followed them and their work with interest.

So today we went for coffee and we ended up in one of our local garden centres. Who was there to greet us at the door but a large reindeer complete with tinsel wrapped around his neck. I enjoy Christmas when it arrives, but something in me says I am just not ready to ‘do Christmas’ in mid October.

But this morning’s unexpected reindeer meeting got me thinking. How long is ‘too long’ when it comes to looking forward to Christmas? When we open our Bibles (in particular the Old Testament part) we discover that God’s people spent a long time, a very long time, looking forward to the first Christmas. The book of Isaiah was written about 700BC. Writing at a time of much uncertainty, global insecurity and individual anxiety, Isaiah found himself looking forward. Here’s what he wrote:

‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.’ Isaiah 7 vs 14

‘Immanuel’ is a name, it means ‘God is with us’. A promise, a big promise that one day God would step down into a lost and fallen world and come to be with us, to walk in our shoes, to experience our experiences and ultimately to bridge the gap between us and our Creator. To rescue us, or as the Bible puts it elsewhere ‘to save us’, at enormous cost to Himself. It was a big promise. And God’s people looked forward. They looked forward for 700 years. They looked forward to the first Christmas.

And when it arrived – well what a Christmas! Huge promises fulfilled, huge hope injected into a hopeless world, huge transformation for all who would believe. So much more than reindeers and tinsel. The more I think about it the more I find myself looking forward to Christmas.