Merry Christmas!

Your Christmas celebrations may not look or feel or be exactly the way you would prefer them today. Of course, “life not being the way we prefer it” is rather on brand for this year. Adjectives like “crazy” and “unprecedented” infuse our vocabulary. The truth though is that this year has been so much more than crazy and unprecedented. This has been a year full of real loss, real injustice, real death, and real grief.

And yet, in the midst of all that, this Christmas Day we echo our “joyous strains” because today there is good news for everyone! As the messenger told those shepherds in their fields so long ago, “This day a Liberator has been born for you!”

Today, Christmas Day, we remember and celebrate the birth of the one called Emmanuel, God with us. This Christmas day we remember and celebrate God’s ultimate act of love and solidarity with us — joining us in our humanity and calling us to be our best selves by allowing God’s love to shine in and through us in the pursuit of justice. 

Or, put another way: as the song says, “This year, this year, let the day arrive when Christmas comes for everyone, everyone alive!”

Merry Christmas to all!

Oh! Also, don’t forget to join us for worship this Sunday, December 27th for our 5th annual Christmastide Homily and Hymns experience! Has to be a little different this year due to, you know, the pandemic and all. But we’ll have some fun and enjoy a lot of music anyway. Don’t miss “Sing We Now of Christmas, Vol. 5” OR “Incarnation v. Empire.” The video premiers at 10:00AM this Sunday, December 27th on our Woodridge UMC YouTube channel.