Christmas, 2012

Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

Every year, as I watch A Charlie Brown Christmas, my heart aches for Charlie Brown, beat down by “commercialism”, struggling to overcome the nagging sense that he goes through the holiday motions, but misses what is essential to Christmas. He’s sad and isolated, as the world clamors for Christmas presents, vies for popularity, and distorts Christmas into a money making machine. Remember how he desperately cries out, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?!?!”

That was 1965, and it seems that the annual holiday season is even further distorted and confused today. Everywhere we turn someone is trying to sell us something that promises to make our season bright – as if a gadget with a bigger and brighter screen could bring light to our lives. Every television ad, every pop-up window on our computer screens, every shop window insists that we add another item to our Christmas list.  Our society shamelessly champions materialism at this time of year, and yet there is an undercurrent of shame even with the word Christmas.  We are pressured to proclaim a generic Happy Holidays, taking the focus of the season further and further away from the manger of our New Born Lord, and placing more emphasis on our own appetites for the latest, hottest, and passing thing.  Like Charlie Brown, many of us have lost track of what Christmas is all about.

Christ was born to bring love, forgiveness and peace to the world.  What if we made those words our Christmas to do list, and pursued them the way we do our Christmas shopping?  Let us resolve this Christmas to be more loving, to experience forgiveness, to invite peace into our hearts and homes.  Instead of listing what we hope to get, let’s let go of resentments and guilt, forgiving those who have hurt us and seeking forgiveness from one another and from our New Born King.  Let our priority be spending time, instead of money, on our loved ones.  Let us give them our love before any other gift. And let us seek peace, this Christmas, from the only one who can give it to us, Christ our God, who was born in a manger, for our salvation.

Father Alex, Presbytera Xanthi, Anastasia and I, along with our whole family, wish you and your loved ones a blessed and Merry Christmas, one during which you find the true meaning of Christ’s birth.  Please offer your support to our church family this Christmas, and may God bless you and your loved ones abundantly during the Nativity Season and always.

Faithfully

Father Constantine Lazarakis, Presbyter