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Last month I traveled to the nation’s capital on assignment for Reformation and Revival Ministries. While there, I had some free time to see the city. In one afternoon, I toured the Holocaust Museum, Arlington Cemetery and the Pentagon. At the Holocaust Museum I walked quietly with hundreds of people through a four-story memorial dedicated to the remembrance of six million Jews brutally slaughtered by the Nazis. The museum included a collection of some personal belongings - shoes, combs, watches - left behind by victims who were violently gassed and buried. From there, I hopped on the Metro Rail and made my way to Arlington Cemetery. I walked across the lawns lined with thousands of white tombstones marking the graves of some of our nation’s finest, many of whom had fallen in battle. The pathways marked out a walk through the history of war - from the Civil War to the Gulf War, from the Battle of Shiloh to the Battle of the Bulge. Here lied the corpses of the slain, memories to the bitter struggles of a nation. An hour later, I boarded the rail again and went a few miles south to the Pentagon. There I walked around the massive building, past the military police, until I came to the side with the gaping wound. A crowd of people had gathered to look upon the wreckage of September 11th. At the base of a few nearby trees people had left flags, poems, stuffed animals and flowers in memory of those who died at the hands of terrorists.

I ended the evening at The Falls Church Episcopal for a conference sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Institute. On the church grounds, I walked past the original sanctuary built in 1769 and an historic cemetery, which rested the bodies of those who had died in the Lord.

At last I sat down in a new, spacious sanctuary to hear a series of lectures on Resurrection and Life after Death: Exploring the Christian Hope. In four sessions, N.T. Wright set forth from Scripture the meaning of Christ’s resurrection from the dead and the reality of God’s future work of restoration.

That evening in the hotel, I realized what a striking juxtaposition my day had been. On the streets of D.C., I had toured the world of death and darkness. On the pages of Scripture, I had gained fresh hope in the life and witness of Jesus of Nazareth.

Two thousand years ago Jesus came to ground zero. He came in the days of Caesar Augustus to a world stricken with evil and marred by violence. He came to a people who preferred the lights off and the window curtains drawn shut. He moved into a neighborhood that had been boarded up by fear and suspicion. It was there in the rubble that Christ went to work. He came to earth to put the world to rights and to win a victory over death and evil. He visited his people to rescue them from sin and judgment and to secure their inheritance in kingdom.

At Christmas we remember that the One who came then, will surely come again. The work started will certainly be completed. The kingdom inaugurated will be the kingdom consummated. And that piece of news is a package worth unwrapping this Christmas season.