Today I would argue that our current cultural understanding of Christmas isn't as a time of excess but as a time of fervor.

Hope, in [Advent], is located in the sense of seeing with greater clarity God’s interaction with creation both now and in the days to come.

Revelation was intended to give hope to a people going through impossible chaos. And God’s vision at the end of Revelation, the last word, so to speak, is incredibly hopeful. We need that now.

The message of the angel is as scandalous and striking now as it was then. For in it is embedded God’s message in the death and resurrection of Jesus: to trust and believe in the invincibility of the good in spite of the titanic reality of evil, because God is good all the time.