ADVENT / CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

December 2003

The Advent / Christmas period is a time of anticipation, preparation, and celebration. In the 4 weeks before Christmas many Christians observe Advent (lit. He comes) as a time of looking forward to the final fulfilment of God’s long awaited promise.

Jesus Christ is the focus of Advent and Christmas, when Christians pray that God’s Kingdom will come. All through Scriptures we hear of this hope. Despite human wilfulness and wandering God is faithful, and patiently and lovingly restores the lost.

As people we aren’t very good at the anticipation and preparation part of this season. We seem to prefer the party at the end. Christmas has crept forward in the calendar until it completely covers the 4-week season of Advent. Everyone loves a baby – but knowing the love of God is much more than sentiment over a child, wonderful though that is.

Christmas is for adults, especially adults in the faith who know and celebrate the depth of the love of God in Christ. The baby who was born is also the baby who was laughed at, beaten, and killed. The child was born to die for the world.

Christians today have many ways of describing who Jesus is and what his ministry means. The central narrative of our faith, however, remains the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is Immanuel, God with us.

We can be so enmeshed in the anxieties of our lives that we fail to see and hear who God is and what God is doing. In an ephemeral search for happiness we can clutch at straws only to be disappointed in the morning. Because people want happiness and want it NOW, the subversive Christmas gospel of patient love, service, and faithfulness can appear unattractive and barren.

The celebration of the birth of Christ, whatever date it is held, unites Christians across the world. It calls us again to faithfulness, a virtue that is greatly undervalued today. It is a defining moment, one when we should ask: “Who are we worshipping?” “What does it mean that we worship him?” “How does it change my life that this child is my Lord?”

The National Council of Churches in Australia extends a Christmas greeting to all its member churches, and its many friends and supporters around Australia and across the world. May the Christ be born in all our hearts, and our worship this season be filled with the true riches of God.

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The Revd Professor James Haire
President