What gifts do we really need to give?

By now many of you will have started your Christmas shopping – running the gauntlet of getting the right gift for the right person. More often than not knowing that the person you are buying for does not actually need or want for very much at all.

During the week I heard the statistic that last year in Australia 25 million unwanted gifts were disposed of after last Christmas. This gives a whole new meaning to boxing day! The estimated cost of these gifts was one billion dollars! This amount of money is staggering and no doubt we have all given and received gifts that are not appreciated.

As Christian people the celebration of Christmas must find its way back to its roots – celebrating God’s gift of Jesus, a gift of abundant life and renewed relationships. Maybe this Christmas instead of absenting ourselves from family for hours on end to buy the gifts we could consider the gift of time shared: growing those cherished relationship; reconciling those relationship that have become strained; and celebrating our shared existence in the light of God’s love.

If you still have a hankering to spend money on gifts why not buy something from the UCA “Everything in Common” catalogue or the World Vision “Smiles” catalogue for someone who really does need a helping hand.

Greed as idolatry

The message of Jesus and of the scriptures challenges the very core of our culture. A core which Clive Hamilton in his book Requiem for a Species indicates is the growth fetish. He says “In affluent societies religious value seems now to be invested in the most profane object, growth of the economy, which at an individual level takes the form of the accumulation of material goods.”

Our whole culture, its society and economy, is built on the assumption that we cannot resist the desire for more and that we can create our own identity by what we own. Advertising trains us to covet. Not only does this showing complete disregard for the 10th Commandment, it denies our identity and life coming to us as a gift from God. If we are to set our minds on things that are above there is deep spiritual and personal challenge here for me and for you. To use a phrase coined by Byron Smith “To make wealth history”.

This is no easy task but if we are to ask ourselves what kind of faith we are passing down to our children and the answer is to help our children be good citizens in a culture that is built on denying our life as being in the image God and encouraging them to find our own identity by what they own then I believe we have completely lost sight of the gospel message. So in this matter of greed, which idolatry, how do I put death to it? How do I set our minds on the things which are above? How do you?