President Bugbee offers Christmas greetings on behalf of the ILC

President Robert Bugbee.

ONLINE – President Robert Bugbee of Lutheran Church–Canada has penned this year’s Christmas greetings from the International Lutheran Council (ILC).

“God is sending Bethlehem’s Good News out across the world once again this Christmas,” President Bugbee writes. “His Christ is coming into all sorts of lands and situations. He is there where people are terrified over the spread of Ebola, because they have witnessed loved ones and friends cut down in the prime of life and cannot see the end of the outbreak. He wants to enter into homes and families in eastern Europe, worried that they won’t get enough natural gas to heat their dwellings as the days grow colder, and sore at heart over the shooting and bombing which have killed their neighbours and blown up large sections of their towns and cities.”

“He wants to come close to the comfortable and often very self-satisfied inhabitants of prosperous nations, who imagine they are doing quite fine on their own and don’t need a god to help them with much of anything,” President Bugbee continues. “The little Christ is seeking admittance to hospital units, prison cells, and lonely bedrooms where somebody lost a life’s partner this year and now faces the first holiday season alone. ‘This little Child of lowly birth… shall be the Joy of all the earth.’ Yes, He has come to be the joy for all those various situations, and a hundred others you cannot even imagine.”

Read his whole letter here: “The Joy of All the Earth.”

The International Lutheran Council is a global association of confessional Lutheran church bodies of which Lutheran Church–Canada is a member. President Robert Bugbee currently serves as Vice-Chairman of the ILC.

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