The Christian story starts off with a place and a date: “In the days of King Herod, in Judea.” [Luke 1:5] Luke pins the whole story down to a piece of legislation. He tells us that God became man in the year when Caesar Augustus was taking a census to raise taxes. This is an astonishing claim. God didn’t come to us, “Once upon a time in a land far, far away.” He came to a real place, at a real moment in time, in the middle of social and political turmoil, disease and poverty, power struggles and scheming. He came to a family that was in crisis, to a woman who was powerless. The first followers of Jesus were so convinced that this is what had taken place, that they called it NEWS, not myth or fiction. GOOD NEWS of God’s love visiting us at our place and in our time of need. This is the NEWS that you need, that our world still needs today.

Luke 1:31-33 “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”