Nativity Message from His Eminence Metropolitan Christopher

Every year, hundreds of millions of Christians celebrate the Nativity of the Son of God. On this great feast, millions of children of God experience and feel God's proximity in the atmosphere of God's love and grace. Being permeated and illumined by the angelic hymn: "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will among men" (Luke 2:14), we are united with the newly born God-child.

Let us always remain faithful to God, let us live according to God's teaching, and then, every day will resemble Christmas. We must not allow the message of peace, love, and benevolence of Christmas to be obscured by our selfishness and insensibility. In order to avoid those snares and temptations in life, our Lord Jesus Christ, has left to us commandments: "as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise" (Luke 6:31), moreover "thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself" (Mark 12:31). Had the world fulfilled just these two commandments all violence and wars would vanish, and all differences between the powerful ones and the little ones, the rich and the poor, the proud and the humble, the educated and the uneducated would disappear. Then the World would be like a true family.

Man cannot become spiritually uplifted through dry statements and lifeless instructions which have not been supported by a living example. Only Christ, of all teachers of the world, could say for Himself: "though ye believe Me not, believe the works" (John 10:38). This is what revitalized His disciples, and through them their successors alike to this day. He entrusted to them His Church, in which He invisibly acts and transforms human conscience according to His promise: "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world" (Matt. 28:20).

In anticipation of the great feast of the Nativity of our Savior, we call upon all of our spiritual children, upon the fullness, of our Holy Church to remember in their donations the Monastery of St. Sava in Libertyville, the See of the Serbian Church in North and South America.

CHRIST IS BORN - INDEED HE IS BORN!

At Christmas, 2009

Your intercessor before the God-Child,

+CHRISTOPHER
Metropolitan of Chicago-Libertyville