The Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas
In our culture, we seem to have a stigma against the phenomenon of regifting, believing that every gift ought to be entirely new, entirely bought or made for us, or it can't really be "ours." It's the joke that gets played on many sitcoms and earns a lot of laughs. Some regifts are even true: I'm reminded of a story a friend of mine told me once about giving a fancy lamp as a wedding gift to some friends of hers. "They must not have liked it," she said. "When I got married a couple years later, I got the exact same lamp." My friend wasn't all that offended actually, and like the sitcoms, it became a good story and a good laugh.
Is that all re-gifts are good for, though - a good laugh? In reality, we re-gift all the time with hand-me-downs and white elephants and other things that we know others can use more than we can - and that's a good thing. When I got pregnant for the second time, I got phone calls from many friends saying, "Hi - I was thinking of you today because I'm thinking of getting rid of our baby swing and I thought you could use it." Or, when it comes to the preschool Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program, I am so grateful for all of the "re-gifts" that people have given for us to use.
Today's scriptures suggest that God is a "re-gifter" too. At the end of the gospel lesson (John 1:1-18) we read: "From his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace." Grace is another word for "gift" and part of what John is saying in this passage is that God has given himself to people before, over and over again. He gave himself in the Law of Moses (aka the Ten Commandments), but not everyone received the law as a gift. So, God re-gifted himself in the form of the Word, Jesus, who was and is God. The Incarnation, the idea that God willingly became human, is a tough gift for some people to receive, especially if they see God as entirely transcendent, above us, separate from us. But part of the point in this Gospel is to see that this Word God gave to us has been there from the very, very beginning of things. That means that God has ALWAYS been a giving and re-giving God, always wanting to share himself with us, from the moment of Creation, to the time God gave the Israelites the law, and right down through the present age. The fact that God "re-gifts" himself is good news for us humans because it means we can always return to that relationship, even if we have broken it.
So part of the importance of the "re-gift" is that we come to know and understand God's love for us. But there is more. In the first lesson (1 John 2:18-21), the author speaks to the people about knowing the truth. The people who are receiving this letter already know the truth, says the author, so in this letter they are simply being reminded of that truth. "Re-gifting" allows for renewal and regeneration, a re-start in our lives.
On this, the last day of our secular calendar, as we look back over 2010, the Christmas message of re-gifting gives us the opportunity to renew our lives with God once again. Today let us give thanks to God for the fact that God graciously and continuously "re-gifts" us with himself.
- Jana M. Bennett