Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.

     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If, as the gospel accounts tell us, God has really come, if God has really visited his creation, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.
     One can choose to believe this, one can chose to not.  The choice is everyone's to make.  Either way, our corporate interest in and fascination with Christmas underscores the state of all of our hearts:  we long for the joy of the transcendent moment.

     As the Christmas lights fade, we realize that, belief aside, it is in our humanness that we see Christmas most fully.  We look for meaning, we look for the joyous point.  We look for existential authentication.  And, we ought to ask ourselves, why?  Who are we?
     Long after it's gone, Christmas will continue to remind us that we insist that we must live in a universe of meaning.  We could not live otherwise.  Christmas reminds us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it appeals to the fact of eternity, the visible word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time.  It is only then that it can be.
     God has come.