CHRISTMAS YEARNING [F, 12-15-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—CHRISTMAS YEARNING [F, 12-15-23]

 

I sometimes think that I became a preacher just so I could do a Christmas sermon. Or, maybe more accurately, I have always preached Christmas sermons all year long. My theology is always rooted in Christmas. I don’t need lighted trees and manger scenes to preach a Christmas theology.

By Christmas theology I don’t mean the emotional feel of warm family scenes and an evening church service lighted only by candles. I mean the theology of the presence of God that comes to us in human form, even in, perhaps especially in, a little baby.

Or maybe I became a preacher only because I was “just a story-teller,” and Christmas is the quintessential time for stories.

In my early churches, I basically tried to tell the birth of Jesus story as my Christmas Eve sermon, rail against commercial Christmas, try to force onto people “the true meaning of Christmas.” Folks were nice. They didn’t much care what I said. They didn’t come to church on Christmas Eve to hear a sermon. They came for the candles and “Silent Night.”

I began to understand that it was both useless and disrespectful to try to make them think about Christmas the way I thought they should.

So I began to write a Christmas short story to use as my sermon on Christmas Eve. They were never specifically about the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. I thought I might get people to open up to the presence of God in a secular story that pulled them into the Christian story in an unexpected way.

Thinking back now, having written those five rather boring paragraphs above, I realize that I wanted to preach a Christmas sermon when I first started because I had what I thought was a perfect “illustration,” and it just seemed like a sin to have an illustration and not use it.

My family had a cardboard nativity set. We’d fold the figures flat at the end of each season and store them in their box for next year. We had gotten them out for Christmas of… 1955? We always set them up on the top shelf of our one bookcase, the one Uncle Bob, from whom I get my middle name, made in shop class in high school in Oxford, Ohio around 1930. It is plain but very sturdy. Helen has it in her study. [Please forgive the personal history excursion.]

Anyway, my little brother, then about ten years old, had received a gift in one of those dollar-sized envelopes with an oval in the middle so that you could see what money denomination you had received. It came in a Christmas card. He took the bill out and casually tossed the special envelope over his shoulder.

It landed in the nativity set. Right in front of the baby Jesus.

I was astounded. It was just perfect! I had just discovered that some people thought Christmas was all about gifts and such and not about Jesus. I was shocked. “Commercialization!” I was the first person who realized Christmas was being commercialized. And here was the perfect illustration of it, a money envelope obscuring Jesus. Oh, I just had to tell someone…

In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of folks don’t “put Christ into Christmas.” That’s okay. He’s there, anyway… in the gifts, and the cookies, and the family gatherings, and even those durn gift cards. Especially in the yearning of little children. Definitely, Christ is in all the yearning of the season.

John Robert McFarland