Christmas

To Everyone Who Works During Christmas: A Tribute

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It’s Christmas Eve. Today and tomorrow are busy days for pastors.

While many others get a break tonight and tomorrow, pastors like me are hard at work.

We’re preparing for Christmas Eve Candlelight services, Midnight Masses and Christmas Day celebrations.

While others wrap last-minute gifts, travel to grandma’s house and come to church for a much-needed reminder of the reason for all this fuss, we’re hard at work making sure their church experience is everything it should be.

Then we get ready to do it all again on Sunday.

It’s not that I’m complaining. I love every minute of it.

But I wanted to acknowledge this reality for one simple reason.

To say ‘thank you.’

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5 Steps to a Great Last-Minute Christmas Sermon Idea

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Preacher’s Block is a challenge during the best of times, but if you’re a small church pastor like me, you probably do the Saturday Night Scramble more often than you’d like to admit.

And now you also have a Christmas Eve and/or Day message to do, also. Coming up with something fresh to say from the 39 verses of the Christmas story can be very difficult – even discouraging.

Over the decades I’ve discovered a handful of principles that help me meet this challenge and find something fresh from this wonderful, timeless, but oh-so-short story. Here are five of them.

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What a Rabbi Taught Me About Keeping Christ In Christmas

/ 5 minutes of reading

“Keep Christ in Christmas” is a familiar saying this time of the year. But you don’t expect to hear it from the local rabbi.

For several years I was involved in our town’s Police Chaplaincy. One year, at our December meeting, the Methodist pastor noticed that the napkins had a picture of Santa Claus on them. He slid one across the table to the rabbi from the local synagogue.

“Hey Steve,” he asked, “what do Jewish people think about Santa Claus?”

“Nothing,” the rabbi responded as he picked up the napkin. “Santa is a Christmas character.”

“But he’s a secular figure,” countered the Methodist. “Don’t you even let the kids do presents from Santa so they won’t feel left out?”

“No,” he responded. “We don’t worry about that. In fact I think you Christians ought to keep Christ in Christmas.”

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