The Sunday after...
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The Sunday after Christmas is calculated to be a bit of a "downer" compared to the Christmas festival itself. Post-holiday blues, back-to-work, and smaller crowds in church will do that to you. Martin Luther has good advice for such a day like this one: "We must not think as we feel" (Luther's Works, Vol. 17, p. 357).
Hanging around Jesus changes those feelings. John Calvin speaks of God's "incomparable love," that his "is not wearied in doing good…" (Calvin's Commentaries, Vol. VII/2, pp. 343, 346). This insight has important implications when dealing with the post-Christmas blues and other hard times. The Reformer writes: "… in adversity we ought instantly to remember those benefits which the Lord bestowed on his people, as if they were placed before our eyes" (Ibid., p. 344).
Keeping in mind Christ's blessings as present realities is another way of sensing Christ's presence in the present, to appreciate that the babe in the manger celebrated earlier in the week has not gone away. The celebration of Christmas continues! The founder of existentialist philosophy Soren Kierkegaard makes this point well:
And so it will always prove when becoming a Christian in truth comes to mean to become contemporary with Christ. And if becoming a Christian does not mean this, then all talk of becoming a Christian is nonsense… For in relation to the absolute there is only one tense: the present.
(Training in Christianity, p. 67)
Hanging around Jesus changes those feelings. John Calvin speaks of God's "incomparable love," that his "is not wearied in doing good…" (Calvin's Commentaries, Vol. VII/2, pp. 343, 346). This insight has important implications when dealing with the post-Christmas blues and other hard times. The Reformer writes: "… in adversity we ought instantly to remember those benefits which the Lord bestowed on his people, as if they were placed before our eyes" (Ibid., p. 344).
Keeping in mind Christ's blessings as present realities is another way of sensing Christ's presence in the present, to appreciate that the babe in the manger celebrated earlier in the week has not gone away. The celebration of Christmas continues! The founder of existentialist philosophy Soren Kierkegaard makes this point well:
And so it will always prove when becoming a Christian in truth comes to mean to become contemporary with Christ. And if becoming a Christian does not mean this, then all talk of becoming a Christian is nonsense… For in relation to the absolute there is only one tense: the present.
(Training in Christianity, p. 67)
