Who Needs Christmas: Life Means Limits

Sooner or later, everyone comes up against a circumstance he or she can’t change. Sooner or later there is a disease or a divorce or a death that you have to live with. The Good News? Christmas is about living within these sorts of limits. Preacher: Andrew Forrest Scripture: Luke 2:1-12, John 20:5-7 “Reference: For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”

—Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos (1949)