It’s hard to believe how quickly 2016 flew by. But flown it has… a welter of significant events… in our individual lives and in our life together as a church body. As I write this blog I am about to perform the funeral of a dear and longtime member of Singing Oaks, Alma Haley. And then tonight there will be a wedding rehearsal and tomorrow there will be a wedding in this same building. Death and new life celebrated back to back within a day.

Of course, as the year ends it’s a birth that’s on everyone’s mind… The birth of the son of God. And what a thought that is: that God would come to be born among us; that God would choose to be utterly helpless and in need of human help; that He would come to share in our situation… to really be one of us and not just one of us but the most vulnerable of us, a baby born into impoverished circumstances.

It is without a doubt the most amazing thought that ever has been…. not just that God became human… that is mind-boggling enough. But the idea that the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God would choose to become a totally helpless crying baby in order to experience what we experience… I defy you to come up with any idea that stretches your mind like that one.

It’s fundamentally changes our whole notion of who God is. He is not the God of the philosophers. He is far more amazing. And evidently we matter to him a very great deal. We matter to him infinitely.

In life and in death he belongs to us and we belong to him. That’s what we celebrate at Christmas, “Emmanuel”…. God with us. In life and in death God is with us.