A Christmas message

by the Very Revd Jonathan Draper, the Dean of Exeter Cathedral.

Your Christmas Day may be just beginning, or it may be nearly over.

However much of it has gone, I hope there has been joy, amid the frenzy that comes with present opening, turkey basting and cooking and for many of us, fitting in a few church services as well!

After all the hectic preparations, the arrival of Christmas day itself can sometimes feel like an anti-climax.

After the presents have been opened, the food eaten, the crackers pulled, what then?

What has all the rush and excitement been for? The good news for all of us is that Christmas isn’t the end of anything, the climax of all our preparations – it’s the beginning of everything. Its the start of a wonderful new life.

Christmas is God coming to us and starting us on a new journey. We all know the world needs changing – we can see the problems all around us: war, famine, poverty, broken banking, corporate irresponsibility: the list could be very long, and you’d have things to add from your own experience.

The point of Christmas is that we celebrate a new way of looking at the world, for we can see in Jesus how the world should be.

And more than that, because of that baby born in a manger, God now sees the world through our eyes and knows the full range of our experience.

That’s the big message of Christmas: the world doesn’t need to be the way it is because of a baby born in Bethlehem.