The Christmas Gospel: Hearing the Good News of Christmas Again for the First Time

 For so many, the story of Christmas has become “old hat.”  We know the story, we think.  Heard it a hundred times.  Add the commericialization of the season to this familiarity and it is difficult to really encounter the revolutionary nature of the gospel—the earth-shattering, reality-bending “good news” of what it means that a King has been born who will overthrow all the kingdoms of the earth and bring God’s renewal to all creation.

For this season of Advent, as we anticipate Christmas Day, we will seek to chip away the hardened crust of our familiarity with the “good, old story” and push aside the clutter of commercialization in order to hear the good news of Christmas again for the first time.  We will discover that while the Scriptures provide a single coherent witness to God’s act of salvation in human history, they are wonderfully diverse in the way that the story of Christ’s birth is told.  Rather than trying to homogenize the differences, we’ll embrace their diversity and explore the nuances of each as together they give us a fuller, more robust picture of our gospel hope.