Christmas begins by holding it in our hearts, before it lives forth through us.

For God’s Christmas to hold seed and bloom, we need to allow our hearts and souls to be plowed through humble repentance and joyous expectation.

Christmas is not something “magical” to divert us from dreary lives, but the joyous consummation of God’s complex relational work with all peoples.

Each Present Christmas Presents the Future Christmas and Culmination in our Lord Jesus Christ.

with guest pastor John Owen

This movement from self-possession to a more complex, inspired, and receptive vision of things is, I would suggest, relevant to the process that brings Jacob from a discrete, “mind of winter” view of his children to one that allows him to see them as flowing, feeding one another, growing, passionate, and capable of transformations. – Aviva Gotlieb Zornberg

Characteristically, then, Jacob leads from behind: he is the thinker, the one who projects in images and words, the director behind the scenes. This is, properly speaking, the position of the hunter, tracking his prey from the rear. Jacob comes into the world behind: “After that (aharei khen), his brother emerged, holding on to the heel of Esau; so they named him Jacob” (25:26).

Leaving all support systems behind him, Jacob moves into the world of the night. Here, nothing is clear, all is shifting, phantasm, illusion. And here, paradoxically, Jacob finds his ground of truth.

Jacob searches for his authenticity among all the “lendings” of the theatrical wardrobe. What Isaac senses is the “smell of my son,” which transforms the costumes of insincerity. It is ultimately the essence of his son—permeating clothes and skins—that registers as blessing.

-- Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

Abraham’s laughter, through which he communed with others, was a “pseudo-language,” in which “silence is the essence.” Now this essence is explored to its full, almost intolerable, extent. To live in a world in which the essential is experienced implicitly, wordlessly, is to return to the base out of which laughter, feeding, and ultimately speech emerged. -Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire (p. 172)