Welcome to December and my advent blogging. I can’t believe it’s December. I’m not sure what happened to the year.

For this year’s advent posts I thought I’d work through the first two chapters of Luke’s gospel, a little each day. So, time to kick off the month…

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us,just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Often people consider Luke the ‘go-to gospel’ for the Christmas narrative. However, maybe it’s the English teacher in me, but describing Luke’s gospel as a narrative text type doesn’t seem in line with the author’s aim.

(That last line really did sound like an English teacher.)

Read again what Luke writes – ‘I have carefully investigated everything’… ‘an orderly account’. Perhaps we would do better thinking of Luke’s gospel as an ‘information text’. Luke writes aiming to be informative.

So perhaps this December there are some questions we need to ask ourselves: how much information do I know about the first Christmas? Is it just the information I learnt as a child?

Or, if you do know a lot about Christmas: how informative are you being for others this December who don’t know much about Christmas?

Something to consider.

Yours aiming to inform,

Alison