One Week Until Christmas

Here we are, one week before Christmas.  I am grateful for my slow schedule, for my family members who don't cause me stress, for my years on earth which help me keep perspective when it comes to the holidays and many other days.

I am also grateful for my congregation.  Unlike other congregations that I've heard of through clergy sites and individual experiences of friends, my congregation is low stress.  It may also be part of the nature of my very-part-time position--they have no reason to have expectations of me beyond Sunday.

I am not stressed about my Christmas Eve sermon.  Advent and Nativity texts are much easier for me to preach than Easter texts.  Actually, Easter texts are easy, if I focus on resurrection.  The crucifixion is so tricky.  And sadly, so many churches spend far more time mired in the crucifixion and the whole issue of personal sin than they do on resurrection and the overcoming of the powers of evil and death.

Happily, I am not a preacher who addresses Good Friday on Christmas Eve, as interesting an approach as that may be.  

I am interested in the ways that Christianity might have been VERY different, had we built our customs and beliefs around the Nativity and not the crucifixion.  But that's a topic for a seminary class, not a sermon.

Let me enjoy this last week, and let me continue to remember how lucky I am that this is a week of enjoyment untinged by the kind of stress that most people feel a week from Christmas.