Excitement!

Could you think of a better time to be at Holy Trinity, Williamstown? I have always felt that anything new is exciting. That is the thrill we feel as we unwrap presents round the Christmas tree. Something new is about to come into my life! How exciting!

Our Christmas present as a parish this year is our shiny new Parish Centre. So many things have been put on hold for years while we have waited for our efforts to come to fruition, when a place for it all to happen became ours. The dream of a completed Parish Centre has now become the dream of all we will be able to do with it.

Our morning tea after church will no longer on a rickety folding table at the back of the church. Our Community Meal and Emergency Relief services will come home to Holy Trinity. Toilets are no longer a temporary tin box shared by all! The bliss! Community Groups calling our centre home and showing the local people around us that the Christian Church has something to offer and a part to play in our community.

It is so good we are opening it on the Sunday that begins Advent, the season where we prepare ourselves to celebrate God’s greatest gift. This gift of his Son gave humanity a new understanding of itself. We are no longer mere mortals at the mercy of a distant God, but we are now loved beings accompanied by God’s own Son back into the embrace of a caring, forgiving and merciful Creator.

So put up your Christmas tree and cover it with lights. I know both those things emanate from Germanic and Roman festivities that celebrated the forest and the Sun and that both symbolised life coming into the world. I would guess that is why Christians adopted them from earlier religions, to mark the celebration of the true life God offers us coming into the world. To proclaim that the God who “emptied himself of all but love” and joined us here in the world to fulfill God’s purpose of winning us back.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall
not perish but have eternal life.  John 3:16

The Venerable Bill Beagley
Vicar

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