Christmas Prayer

Thank You Lord, for this beloved and familiar season:

For tuneful carols,

For reunions with families and friends,,

For giving and receiving,

For a sense of celebration everywhere,

For all the ways of saying ‘Christ is born.’

We ask that the familiarity of Christmas  may not smother the truth that we celebrate together.

May Christ be among us, as real, as close, as warm as that first Christmas in Bethlehem:

With Mary, may we open our hearts to the word of God, that Christ may be born in us;

With the shepherds, may we hear in the world of our daily work what heaven is saying to us;

May our experience of Christ be as real and enduring as theirs.

Save us from a faith so shallow that we put away our Christian commitment with the decorations or discard it like an unwanted present.

Father, in Christ you embrace our happiness and our need: give to us a love that shall exclude no one.