Prayer for the Modern Christmas

Father, our complex industrial society looks for a word from You, and finds this simple pastoral scene of shepherds and a stable.  Show Your Church whether it's any good our going on telling the world this particular story.

We love it, of course.  We've loved it since the Church first told it to us, when we were children.  But it hasn't particularly helped us to grow up in wisdom as fast as we grew up in stature.

We thank You for the nostalgia we feel when we hear the Christmas story: but please, our Father, don't let us enjoy the nostalgia too much, in case it encourages us to let our whole religion be an anachronism - something that belongs to a different time in our lives from the time we're now living in, so that we have to waste precious time thinking how to bring it back into the present again.
 
Teach us that Your Son is here, not there.  Remind us that the gospel is in the fact of Christ, not in His setting; and that the story about His birth does not add up to very much without the story of His claims, His deeds, His death, and His disciples.

Father, You have brought each of us here together on the strength of some vision of Your glory already seen; and in this we are not so unlike the shepherds.  Help us, then, so to approach Bethlehem that our vision may be verified for us, as theirs was for them.  May we, too, become part of the story of Christ's life.  For His sake. Amen.

-Contemporary Prayers for Public Worship, ed. Caryl Micklem (London: SCM Press, 1971), 113-114.