Entering Christmas

One of my favorite things to do is to prepare worship during advent and Christmas. This week I’m working on putting together somethings for our Christmas Eve Candlelight service and our Christmas morning worship. I’ve been going back through some of the worship plans for previous years and came across this beautiful quote from Oscar Romero we read a couple Christmas Eve’s ago. He is someone I look up to and I was glad to share this with our meeting. Here it is:

No one can celebrate
a genuine Christmas
without being truly poor.
The self-sufficient, the proud,
those who, because they have
everything, look down on others,
those who have no need
even of God – for them there
will be no Christmas.
Only the poor, the hungry,
those who need someone
to come on their behalf,
will have that someone.
That someone is God.
Emmanuel. God-with-us.
Without poverty of spirit
there can be no abundance of God.

-Oscar Romero

It reminds me to ask, how do I enter Christmas. Or more pointedly, how do “Christmas” enter me. What must I do to make myself more accessible to the abundance of God. Romero’s answer here is challenging and necessary for our Western sensibilities.