I love Christmas Eve. People are extra nice and polite- from security guards to convenience store clerks; restaurant managers to baggage counter personnel.
As I write this, I see dozens of fireworks all over Metro Manila illuminating the night sky from my 7th floor apartment window. I just returned home from a meaningful dinner with family following an equally meaningful and beautiful Christmas Eve Candlelight worship service with a couple thousand people. It was an amazing feeling to have lead worship tonight. I stood infront of thousands of people holding candles with flickering flames singing well-loved Christmas carols in honor of the Christ-child. It was a blessing to hear four sermonettes on Christmas.
My family drove to Eastwood for Christmas Eve dinner and took my nephews Jared and Jacob shopping for toys--my gifts to them. As I was paying for the items we bought, my nephew Jared tugged my shirt and asked, "Is 'Pastor' a job too?" I winked at him and said, "Yeah." A few seconds later he tugged my shirt again and said, "I know who your boss is!" I asked, "Who?" wondering if he would say Pastor Luis. Then with a smile he said, "JESUS."
After the festivities, I entered an empty apartment wondering whatever happened to my family which together with growth and maturity lost a sense of tradition that began years and years back when the entire family stays together on Christmas eve, help each other prepare the Noche Buena dinner, exchange gifts in the living room after dinner, and going to bed at 3AM knowing that there will be a throng of relatives and friends who will come by our house on Christmas morning. When my siblings married and my mom passed away, we retained the tradition, until a couple of years back when it became inconvenient for us to gather at home and opted for restaurant dinners. And so I am here in my apartment, alone, but not lonely. The good thing about tradition though, is that we can always make new ones. When it is time for me to have my own family, we can have our own tradition.
And yet, a greater thought kept racing in my head; still marveling at the thought that JESUS is my BOSS!
No matter what happens to us, to this world, to human goverments and powers, my Boss remains in power. Which reminds me of a Christmas letter date 1943 by German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his parents at Christmastime. He wrote from prison having been sent there as a conspirator against the Nazi regime. A year and a half later, after passing through several prisons and concentration camps, he would be hanged for his active opposition against Hitler. Fortunately, many of his words have not been dispersed. To his mother and father he wrote,
“Of course you can’t help thinking of my being in prison over Christmas...In times like these we learn as never before what it means to possess a past and a spiritual heritage untrammeled by the changes and chances of the present. A spiritual heritage reaching back for centuries is a wonderful support and comfort in face of all temporary stresses and strains. I believe that the man who is aware of such reserves of power need not be ashamed of the tender feelings evoked by the memory of a rich and noble past, for such feelings belong in my opinion to the better and nobler part of humankind….
“For the Christian, there is nothing peculiarly difficult about Christmas in a prison cell. I daresay it will have more meaning and will be observed with greater sincerity here in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness and guilt look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to man; that God should come down to the very place which men usually abhor; that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn – these are things which a prisoner can understand better than anyone else. For the prisoner the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense. And that faith gives the prisoner a part in the communion of saints, a fellowship transcending the bound of time and space and reducing the months of confinement here to insignificance.
“On Christmas Eve I shall be thinking of you all very much, and I want you to believe that I too shall have a few hours of real joy and that I am not allowing my troubles to get the better of me…It will certainly be a quiet Christmas for everybody, and the children will look back on it for long afterwards. But for the first time, perhaps, many will learn the true meaning of Christmas.”
I recalled the words we just heard read: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Under a warm embrace there was hard content in that Word we named Jesus Christ. Filled with grace and truth, he taught us what really mattered. God wrote us a letter, a Christmas letter, as it were.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
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