“What Christmas means to me.”
Micah
5:2-5a
Luke
1:26-38
Today we find ourselves in an
interesting position. Normally, we have
the fourth Sunday of Advent on one day and then Christmas Eve on another
day. But today we are doing both in one day. The
line between Advent and Christmas is definitely blurred for us today. In one day, we see and feel the tension of
the already and not yet time in which we live.
We know that for God’s people the full and final fulfillment of all that
God has promised has not yet come, and will not come until the Second Advent,
but we also know that the greatest revelation of God’s promise has already
occurred in human history in the birth of Jesus Christ two thousand years ago.
And still, this blurring of the
line between Advent and Christmas also presents us with a challenge, a
challenge to not lose sight of the meaning of one for the sake of the
other. And this is not an easy challenge
for us, because today we are certainly in the Christmas mindset. Our thoughts have now turned toward the
celebration of Christ’s birth, to time with family and
friends, to the giving and receiving of gifts.
Our heightened expectation and time of preparation for the Second Coming
that we focus on during Advent has all but been exchanged for our heightened
expectation and time of preparation for the celebration of the birth of our
Lord and Savior.
Maybe today of all days is an
opportunity for us to really get to the heart of what this time means for us,
to look beyond the festivities of the Holiday, with its decorations and winter
festival music, and commercialization, and hold Advent and Christmas together,
so that we may see this time as what it really is – a time for us to
contemplate the significance of the incarnation of God’s Word in the
world.
And in some sense that is the
challenge, isn’t it? Over the course of
two thousand years, the significance of this moment in human history has lost
some of its punch. We no longer see it
as something extraordinary, something so out of place as to be completely
beyond the scope of human understanding.
The celebration of the birth of a baby in a manger is so ingrained in
our habits and routines that we sometimes forget what this birth means for us,
what it means for the world.
And so our tendency is to hold
this event out as an escape from what is going on in our lives and in the world
around us. At best, it becomes just
another holiday to get away from the constant bombardment of the critical
issues that we and our world face every day.
At worst, it is no longer seen as having any real significance and
impact in the day-to-day lives of people.
After all, can a baby born long ago in a town far away really be the
promised one from God, the Savior of the world, the one who perfectly revealed
the true heart and character of God? It
really does sound too good to be true.
And so maybe today, for this year
anyway, it is good that we hold Advent and Christmas together, so that we may
see and know just how incredible this event is for us and for the world in
which we live, that it is not just some folk tale told to us to make us feel
better about ourselves, but an event that marked the coming of the kingdom of
God into the day to day lives of the ordinary that continues to give even the
ordinary people of today a vision for new life in God and the hope for a better
tomorrow.
And that is
what Christmas means to me – a vision for new life in God and the hope for a
better tomorrow. Advent reminds us that
Christmas is not just about the past, but also about the present and most
importantly about the future. This time
calls us to look beyond ourselves, to the unlimited possibilities and potential
that we have in our new life with God, to the promise of God that nothing is
out of reach, everything and anything is possible, to the hope we now have in
Christ for a better tomorrow. And yet we
continue to struggle with this very notion that we can have a new life with God
and the hope for a better tomorrow. We
continue to believe that it is up to us to make the best of our situation, that
it is up to us to determine the shape of our future and measure ourselves
according to it’s prescribed dimensions. Sure we celebrate Christmas, but does
Christmas really point us to something new, to the radical intervention of God
in our ordinary lives, to a present and a future that is shaped by the
extraordinary presence of Almighty God?
Do we dare to allow the incarnation of the Word of God to really set us
on a new course so that all of our hopes and dreams may be realized, so that we
may see and live out the fullness of our new life with God in the extraordinary
purpose to which we have been called?
Just think for a moment about Mary. I wonder what Mary’s aspirations and hopes
were when she was a little girl? Living
in the small town of
Just when I think I have it all
figured out, just when I think that I am well on my way to the future of my
design, to a life of my own choosing, God rattles my cage, disturbs my
orientation, and forces me to put to death the life I once lived, in order to
have my hopes and dreams for tomorrow reconstructed. The birth of Christ reminds me that God’s
plans don’t always fit so snuggly into my own big plans for the future, and
sometimes that is not so easy. Sometimes
God’s intervention in my life does not always match up to my great scheme of
things. Sometimes it does not always fit
into my perceived expectations of what it means to be in God’s divine
favor. The incarnation of the Word of
God, the Word made flesh, dwelling among us reminds me that his presence is life
threatening to the life I try to construct on my own, but it is life giving in
him, in the extraordinary life he promises.
What does Christmas mean to
me? That God has done something new, is
doing something new, and will do something new, not only in my life and yours,
but also in the world around us. The
coming of Christ two thousand years ago is a reminder that God’s purpose is
beyond our limited vision, beyond her understanding of how things are to
be. It is a reminder that we are not
left to our own devices for charting our own future, that God has other plans
in mind for all of God’s creation, a future that is full of potential and
possibilities, a future that is full of hope and promise, a future that can be
realized today. Mary cannot possibly
completely grasp what this pregnancy and birth will mean, not just for her, but
for all of humanity, for the one she will give birth to in a manager, will be
the one who will reveal the very heart and character of God, will be the one
who will reveal and make possible God’s plan of salvation, will be the one who
will truly be the Son of the Most High.
What does Christmas mean to
me? It means that if God can work in the
life of an ordinary teenage girl, and through her bring about the fulfillment
of God’s plan and purpose for the world, then God can work and in fact does
work in our own ordinary lives for the very same plan and purpose. That’s right.
We too have an active and important role to play in God’s work in salvation
history, in God’s work in fulfilling God’s plan and purpose for the reconciliation
and the redemption of the whole world in Jesus Christ.
God doesn’t choose the best and
the brightest from us to do God’s work, but rather God chooses all of us
ordinary people, with all of our faults and apprehensions, with all of our best
hopes and dreams as well as our worst fears and doubts, and bestows upon us the
divine favor of grace to be a part of something much bigger than ourselves,
beyond our wildest dreams and expectations, beyond even our own plans for our
future.
As Advent comes to an end for us
this morning, and in a few short hours we turn our thoughts to the celebration
of Christ’s birth, my question for you is what does Christmas mean to you? This is no small question for you to answer. It might be life threatening news for you at
first. It might mean that you have to
rethink everything you have come to believe about this event. It might even make you tremble at the
uncertainty of the path that you are on.
It might make you wonder, like Mary, how this can be possible. Or it might just lead you to an extraordinary
vision of new life and a hope for a better tomorrow that is not your own, a future that is expansive and breathtaking, a
future of unlimited possibilities and the unfathomable riches of God’s
grace.
We can rest in the assurance and most certain knowledge that God’s plan and purpose for us will be revealed, that a new life in God and a hope for a better tomorrow is possible, because it has already been revealed in Jesus Christ. The ordinary lives which have been given something extraordinary to do and to bear, even though they may have been bruised in the process, will come to truly know the favor of God and discover the fulfillment of life to which God’s grace brings, all because God sent the Son into the world, to bring light to the darkness, hope to the despairing, peace to the chaotic, and love which brings salvation to the world. This is what Christmas means to me. Amen.