Understanding the true meaning of Christmas

Anxiety builds in anticipation of gifts from loved ones. Gifts are exchanged by family and friends, an outward symbol of the love and affection that bind them together. Gifts are also exchanged by complete strangers and by people who can barely sit in the same room without suffering severe nausea.

Dear Tingasiga:
Markets and shopping centres are hyperactive with buyers in preparation for Christmas. Endless Christmas Carols are played and replayed on public broadcasts as if the aim is to numb us to their original purpose.
Animals and birds helplessly quiver with terror at their pre-ordained fate at Christmas dinner tables. Brewers, vintners and distillers step up production to meet the needs of those who celebrate our Saviour’s birth with drunken orgies.

Hospital emergency departments step up their staffing, expecting an upsurge of casualties, a paradox that reminds us of man’s need for the redeeming birth of Christ.

Anxiety builds in anticipation of gifts from loved ones. Gifts are exchanged by family and friends, an outward symbol of the love and affection that bind them together. Gifts are also exchanged by complete strangers and by people who can barely sit in the same room without suffering severe nausea.

Christmas trees adorn public and private buildings, adding a touch of beauty that harkens back to pagan rituals, now claimed by Churchians, Christians and others besides.
Christmas, of course, means different things to different people. For some it is a time to relax and rest from the labours of the past year. To others it is a time for family to get together and reconnect.
To merchants and transport operators in Uganda it is a time to make sinful profit in service to the gods of capitalism.
For me Christmas does not mean gifts or attention to my gourmand’s palate. I prefer to give to the needy than to receive. Such giving must not be a routine unloading of gifts that assuage our guilt. It is easy to give money and gifts that are left-overs from our self-indulgence.
The challenge at Christmas is not just to give but to give up my treasured possessions or savings to serve the Lord.

Do I wish to give clothes to someone in my village or Church? Let them be my finest threads. Do I want to put food on someone’s table? Let it cost me one year’s worth of the best South African wines that my wife and I enjoy with our dinners.

Do I wish to support a school in my village? Let it be funded by what I would have spent on gifts and decorations this year.

Imagine a country where the wealthy among us choose a school in the rural area and fund its computer laboratory, without seeking public recognition.
Imagine you, Tingasiga, together with 10 of your friends, dispensing with festivities this year and pooling your resources to help a very poor family in your village, unrelated to you, to start a small business or improve their little farm
That is what Christmas invites us to do - sharing our fortune with God’s children. Perhaps you will join me is dispensing with all Christmas shopping and giving everything to those in need.
However, honourable and desirable though it may be, that is not the meaning and purpose of Christmas either.

To those whose lives are in Christ, Christmas is a time of celebration and thanksgiving for the greatest Gift that we received. It is a time for reaffirmation of our faith and total surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ who delivered us from the guilt of sin by His birth, death and resurrection.
By grace we were saved and made alive in Christ “even when we were dead in transgressions” (Ephesians 2:5). We were freed from the power of sin and know that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).

We continue to be “transformed into His likeness with ever-increasing glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18), free from envy, hatred, self-pity, anxiety, conflict, self-abuse and the acts of a sinful nature that Paul talks about in Galatians 5:19-21.

As we join fellow Christians to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Saviour, we continue to walk the beautiful journey on Earth, complete with its painful moments, immersed in God’s abundant grace and assured of glorification, our final deliverance from the presence of sin (John 14:2-3). That is what Christmas means to me.
This Christmas has been clouded by the death of Catherine Bikangaga, a beloved sister and friend, who was called home on December 2. Catherine died young after a valiant battle with cancer, an experience through which she taught us the meaning of valor, grace and determination in the face of pain and certain death.

By God’s grace, the pain and sorrow of losing Catherine has been eased and brightened by the news that she gave her life to Jesus Christ and accepted the salvation that assures her of eternal life.
Catherine’s perishable body was clothed with the imperishable, and her mortality gave way to immortality. In the words of the Prophet Isaiah, her death was swallowed up in victory. (1 Corinthians 15:54)

And so we have said our farewell to beautiful Cathy, confident that we shall see her eternal smile again. The birth, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ assure us of that promise. That is the true meaning of Christmas.
Dr Mulera is a Daily Monitor columnist based in Canada. muniinikmulera@aol.com