 Over the last several days, of course, you've been preparing for the birth of the Christ child. You've done it in family traditions about what you're going to be doing on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. Whether you're going to have guests from out of town. If the family is going to gather in your home or you're going to go somewhere else. Perhaps you may even be spending it alone or with just a few close friends. But all of this is a way to mark something very unique and something that really changed the world. And that is the birth of the Christ child which we will celebrate in a few days. I'd like for us to think about what it really means to celebrate the birth of this Christ child again this year as the church has been doing for over 2,000 years. It's not only a time in which we honor a particular day or we tell the story again. Perhaps the best thing we could do as we remember the birth of the Christ child is to remember how the early visitors to the Christ child reacted and responded. The shepherds after seeing the angels on high and hearing their voices about peace went immediately to Bethlehem. And they left. And they glorified God for what God had already done just in the birth of this baby. And no one at the time knew what that would mean for the future. In a very different way, the Magi, they came to see this Christ child and they left and they honored him. But it's not that they were honoring a king or glorifying a child. Somehow they knew as you know and as I know that this birth of the Christ child would produce something unique in human history. And that is that God's very gift to the world, God's very coming to the world would be a way in which God would begin to model through the birth of this child and this child's manhood about what a life lived following God is truly like. So it's not just enough to sing a few carols. Please do that. But as you leave this time and you move into the next several months think what it really means to honor the birth of this child and to follow the path that Jesus has made for us in terms of how we live with each other, how we treat each other, how we look at the world and how we see others as God sees them as beloved children of God. So I wish for you a very blessed Christmas and I hope that day and the day before on Christmas Eve are great days of celebration for you. But please, as you leave the celebration of the Christmas on Christmas night begin to pray, meditate. How will I follow this Christ in my life for the coming year? May you and yours have a blessed Christmas.