The most lonely Christmas Eve
I didn't even go to worship service on Christmas Eve this year. There was no family gathering. My wife lives and works in a town a little further away, and the children live independently in other places with their spouses, so it was the first time I was alone on Christmas Eve. This is also thanks to Mr. Corona Virus. Looking back, when I was in elementary school, I lived in poverty in a single-mother home with two sisters, but on a Christmas Eve a bit rich and never-married aunt always came to my house with lots of presents and with a great smile. It's a great memory. Perhaps there were some people who were celebrating Christmas Eve alone even at that time. Thanks to Mr. Corona Virus, because of your nasty trick, I am able to experience those people's inner hurts and isolation. Although I couldn't attend the Eve service, there were live services posted on the internet, so I browsed and saw them. Protestant worships and Catholic worships have their own characteristics and styles. Until last year, as a pastor of the local church, I was a busy organizer, and I'd never thought about seeing such worship services as an outsider. I also give credits to Mr. Corona Virus that he made me think about what it would be like from an objective point of view. Objectively, I felt that Christmas was a big fiction-event created by innocent people. In other words, it can be said as an artificial festival. My job as a pastor was also a fiction distributional worker. If Jesus Christ had lived in this world now, he would not have been pleased with such a glamour tinted event. There are several reasons for that. When I lived in Israel for Judaism research, I took a bus trip from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ as anyone knows. By the way, this Bethlehem is in a Hebrew language, a composite of Bate (house) and Lehem (bread), so it can be translated as a House of Bread. The Church of Nativity stands high in the middle of this House of Bread town. This is probably the only ancient building left in Israel. The murals inside the church had mosaics of three magoi from the East, so even though they knew it was a Christian church building they dear not to destroy it. That's what the locals told me. But the problem is not the church itself, but its basement. Underneath that great structure, there was a birthplace of Jesus Christ. That is to say, the first Christmas Eve venue. Until then, I had a traditional image of Nativity, a baby Christ sleeping in a manger in a stable. But what I saw in the basement of the Church of Nativity was completely different. It wasn't like a stable made of wood, it was like a cave dug out in the gap between the rocks. If the local legend is correct, this is the birthplace of Christ. It was a very lonely place. So I could guess that the first Christmas Eve was also very lonely. Thanks to Mr. Corona Virus, I was able to retrospect the origin of the Christmas story. If so, the Christmas events that have taken place around the world are a kind of fiction that separates us from the real birth of Christ. Originally, there was Easter celebration at Early Christianity, but not Christmas. Later, the Western Church set December 25th as Christmas following local winter solstice festival at that time, but the Eastern Church still celebrates January 6th as Christmas. The date is pretty sloppy. No one knows when the Savior was born at that lonely cave in the House of Bread town. No one was able to celebrate. It was a Christmas with only three people, Maria, Joseph and baby Jesus. There was no cake, no banquet, no drinks. It was merely the loneliest Christmas Eve. And the Savior spent his life with the lonely and discarded ones. You can clearly find it out by reading the Bible. Not only that, he wouldn't have hoped that his birthday would be celebrated by many. We are misguided. What he was hoping for was the opposite, I think. Perhaps all of us are to discover that we were not at all lonely in the lonely venue of our lives. We are not alone but with God the Father Creator, that is to say, the phenomenon of Immanuel. It is a rebirth, that is, a born again after discovering the reality of Immanuel in our lives. Yes, it is absolutely, a lonely Christmas. But thanks to wicked Mr. Corona Virus that he made us discover that Christmas is nothing but a celebration of our rebirth. I once heard from a Finnish missionary whose Lutheran church was a national church that they have a song titled "Everyday is Christmas" . Why don't we leave artificial Christmas celebration behind and step forward to a new life that starts every day. Everyday is our Christmas . Every day is our day of born again. This sounds so good. Isn't that what our Savior Jesus Christ wants us to be? Remorse, no! Self-pity, no! Desperation, absolutely no! Having experienced the loneliest Christmas Eve in my life, I am able to perceive the most wonderful Gospel. Happy, Immanuel. HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS CHRIST IN OUR POOR AND LONELY HRARTS! IT'S THE MOST HEART STIRRING EVENT EVER.