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    The Christmas Letters: Celebrating Advent with Those Who Told the Story First
    The Christmas Letters: Celebrating Advent with Those Who Told the Story First
    The Christmas Letters: Celebrating Advent with Those Who Told the Story First
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    The Christmas Letters: Celebrating Advent with Those Who Told the Story First

    By Magrey deVega

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    About this ebook

    Hear from “those who told the story first.”

    You may or may not know the story of your birth. If you do, there is something special about hearing your origin story again and remembering how it all began for you. That’s why we observe Advent: to celebrate how it all began for us. In The Christmas Letters, Magrey deVega invites you to hear about the miracle of Christ’s birth from those who first told the story. The letters in the New Testament, known as the Epistles, contain the first attempts by the church to understand and celebrate the mystery of the Incarnation. They point us to the origins of what we believe about Jesus, fully human and fully divine. By spending time with these holy, ancient words this Advent, you’ll come to know the meaning of Christ’s coming like never before.

    Read the New Testament letters, Romans, 1 John, Philippians, and Colossians as your first Christmas letters of the season and find within them an invitation from God to deepen your understanding of the Incarnation and embrace a fuller commitment to Jesus Christ.

    Components available to use this book in a small group study include a leader guide and video available on DVD.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAbingdon Press
    Release dateSep 3, 2024
    ISBN9781791033255
    The Christmas Letters: Celebrating Advent with Those Who Told the Story First
    Author

    Magrey deVega

    Magrey R. deVega is the Senior Pastor at Hyde Park United Methodist Church in Tampa, Florida. He is the author of several books, including The Bible Year, Savior, Almost Christmas, Embracing the Uncertain, One Faithful Promise, and Songs for the Waiting. Magrey is a graduate of United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, and Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the father of two daughters, Grace and Madelyn.

    Read more from Magrey De Vega

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      Book preview

      The Christmas Letters - Magrey deVega

      INTRODUCTION

      Each year, most of us share in the ritual of sending and receiving Christmas cards. These cards typically contain more than just the commensurate Merry Christmas! greeting and a signature from the sender. Often, they contain photos of the family, highlights of their past year, and words of greeting to family and friends. Sometimes, they even include letters, folded and tucked into the envelope.

      Even though the sending of Christmas cards has been around since the mid-nineteenth century, I’m not sure how or when the tradition of including personal letters began. No other time of year offers such an occasion; not Easter, or New Year’s Day, or Thanksgiving. Somehow, we have taken to Christmas to be the time of reflecting, catching up, and looking ahead.

      Think about the Christmas letters you have received in the past. You scan the photos to see the places your friends have visited. You read the milestone moments they have observed together. You think about your own interactions with them over the past year. You ponder when you might see them again in person.

      These letters are more than news updates or points of reconnection with your family and friends. They are an invitation for their story to intersect with your own, and for your remembrances of them to come alive even for a brief moment in time. You remember what these people have meant to you over the years. You celebrate that, even though you may be separated by distance, you are still connected to one another in kinship and love.

      Christmas is the perfect time to reawaken relationships, remember past connections, and ponder the wonder of love that holds us all together.

      Now imagine that, tucked among the piles of Christmas letters from family and friends, there waits for you a stack of correspondence from the greatest sender of all: the God who created you, loves you, and draws near to you in Jesus. Wouldn’t those be letters worth cherishing?

      This study centers on a special set of letters that were delivered thousands of years ago to the earliest Christian communities in the first-century Greco-Roman world. They were not Christmas letters, but they were letters about Jesus. They were not specifically about his birth, but they give us the earliest glimpses about what the church believed about the Incarnation—the miracle that God became human.

      Some of these letters were written just decades after Jesus was on earth, even while the Gospel accounts were still circulating in oral form before they were written down. All of them represent faithful attempts by the early church to understand who Jesus was and what his life meant for humankind. To read them now, in the light of Advent and Christmas, is to read them as a kind of Christmas letter to the modern-day church, catching us up on how our spiritual ancestors were opening up to the wonder and power of Jesus Christ.

      This study will focus on four Epistles in particular, and we will discover what they reveal to us about what the first Christians believed about the Incarnation. We will see their points of connection to more familiar Advent Scriptures: lectionary texts from the Prophets and the birth narratives in the Gospels.

      In chapter 1, we’ll look at Romans, particularly the first chapter, and see how Paul’s view of Jesus is rooted in the words of the ancient prophets, just as many of the Gospels’ birth narratives are rooted in Isaiah. We’ll see how Advent prompts us to look back at our own spiritual journey, which will guide us in looking forward to the life God intends for us.

      In chapter 2, we’ll look at the First Epistle of John, which is connected theologically and literarily with the Gospel of John. We’ll see how the famous text from John 1, so often read at Christmas, resonates with 1 John, and how they both point to the Creation arc in Genesis 1. Taken together, they will remind us of how God’s love has been revealed throughout salvation history, and is revealed to us in Jesus.

      In chapter 3, we’ll look at Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, including the ancient Christian hymn in the second chapter. We’ll explore how that magnificent Scripture gives us a glimpse into the church’s earliest views of the Incarnation. Jesus became fully human, fully obedient, and he models for us how to have a mindset of servanthood. We’ll connect that to the story of Mary, a standard feature of the third week of Advent, and see how her life exemplifies joyful obedience and service to God.

      In chapter 4, we’ll conclude our journey with Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, which reminds us in the first chapter of Jesus’s full divinity, existing since the days of Creation. When we see Jesus, we see the fullness of God revealed to us, and remember how Jesus is greater than all earthly powers. We’ll connect that notion of Christ’s full divinity with Matthew’s birth narrative, in which Herod saw Jesus as a divine threat to his throne and the Greco-Roman belief in other gods. Most of all, we will be invited to experience the awe and wonder of the Incarnation every day.

      So consider these texts as a special set of Christmas letters, written by our spiritual ancestors and inspired by the God who became flesh for us in Jesus. As we read them, we will see our stories intersect with theirs. Though we are separated by time and distance from the earliest Christians, we will celebrate our kinship as fellow believers, and discover how they began to formulate the very beliefs in Jesus that we have inherited over the generations. Most of all, we will rediscover how to make Christmas more than just an annual observance, but a way of life, modeled after Jesus, all year round.

      Blessings on the journey!

      CHAPTER 1

      GOOD NEWS

      Looking Back to Look Ahead

      From Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for God’s good news. God promised this good news about God’s Son ahead of time through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures. His Son was descended from David. He was publicly identified as God’s Son with power through his resurrection from the dead, which was based on the Spirit of holiness. This Son is Jesus Christ our Lord. Through him we have received God’s grace and our appointment to be apostles. This was to bring all Gentiles to faithful obedience for his name’s sake. You who are called by Jesus Christ are also included among these Gentiles.

      To those in Rome who are dearly loved by God and called to be God’s people.

      Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

      (Romans 1:1-7)

      Because Advent is the beginning of the Christian liturgical year, it is appropriate to spend time reflecting on the past year. It begins in the wake of Thanksgiving, when we gather with family and friends to take an inventory of the blessings we have experienced. It ends on the brink of a new calendar year, as we ponder the highs and lows of the past twelve months in anticipation of what lies ahead. Advent prompts us to consider how we have experienced God in the past, and what we long for in the future.

      In his book What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill describes how the Aymara people of Bolivia and Peru think about time. When you and I envision the past and the future, we see the past as behind us, and the future as ahead of us. Most people and cultures think of the future and past this way, but not the Aymara. They picture the future behind them, and the past as ahead of them.

      Why is that? Well, they recognize that the past is the only thing we can see clearly, whereas the future is unforeseeable. So when they picture the past, they point ahead of them. When they think about the future, they point their thumbs behind them. The Aymara believe that in a way, all of us are walking backward into the future.

      This is an interesting way to think about Advent. We know what the last year has brought us. And while we begin this journey toward Christmas with some preset ideas on what it will bring—family gatherings, gift exchanges, worship services with carols and candles—we don’t really know what moments of serendipity or wrestling it will bring. All we know is what we are longing for, and hoping for, based on what we have already experienced.

      Take a moment, at the start of this season and the start of this study, to reflect on this stage of your life. What burdens are you carrying into Advent this year?

      How is your family? What joys did you celebrate and what hardships still linger?

      How is your career? Is your job bringing you satisfaction, and more than a means toward making a living? If you are unemployed, what have you discovered about yourself? If you are retired, what new passions and talents are being kindled?

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