For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.

         Romans 6:23

So I’ve been working on a different advent reflection all week, but it’s still not done, and this one really popped out at me this morning, so thought I’d send it your way.

One of the major themes of Christmas in our culture is gifts. I don’t know if this is actually a good thing, especially as the focus seems to be what we are getting other people, and what they are getting for us. Somehow I thought we were celebrating Jesus birthday. And my first response to that comes straight from our culture. If it is Jesus birthday we should be giving him presents. Pretty much every year in some way we talk about and try to come up with something to help us all disconnect with the consumer crazed frenzy of Christmas and think about the real meaning of the season - Jesus.

But as I pondered these words from Paul’s letter to the Romans I was struck with the contrast, not between life and death, but between wages and gifts. We live in a wages culture, and the truth is most churches talk about grace, but their practices reflect a wages heartset for life. The way it plays out is something like this - God’s grace has given us the opportunity for life, and we need to DO something to live it out, to open the gift, to experience the life. I have to “get my life together,” I have to start going to church, I have to read my Bible, I have to stop these destructive habits, I have to … They’re all ways we are actually trying to earn favor with God. Even our gift giving can be  a form of wages perspective, as we are trying to earn our friendships and relationships. And I think it even gets a bit darker than that, because something in us feels like if I am earning this thing, then God owes me. If I am out feeding the poor, he owes  me. If I am being kind to my jerk boss, God owes me. We have a wages heartset that discounts God’s extravagant goodness and disrespects his place as our Creator and King.

When I was in Russia I discovered a very different culture considering birthdays which I really loved, but the rest of my family has so far soundly rejected. When it’s your birthday you throw the party! You invite your friends and neighbors. You provide and make the food. You offer gifts to your guests. Isn’t that really what God has done? He created the world. He holds it together. He puts the fuel in the tank to keep it going. He’s fixing what’s broken, and he’s paying the bill. It is good to remember what he’s done and to in gratefulness want to give back to God, and to others, to say thank you and I love you. But we have to remember the glory of Christmas is the gift He is giving to us.

So what is the gift God has given you this year. Will you accept it, or have you’d decided you have to earn it? Maybe we all need to simply let God be God this Christmas. I hear he’s throwing quite a party!