O
God be in my mouth as I speak for you and fill this place with your great grace
that we may leave this place less of what we use to be and more of what we
ought to be, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
For
behold I bring you tidings of great joy, for unto you is born this day in the
city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord.
This
time of year, I find myself struggling to wear two different hats.
The
first one is my professional hat as a priest and the second but more important
hat is the one I wear as a father of three daughters.
In
this festive Christmas season, there is always this lingering anxiety, that I
am not doing enough to help my children realize the true reason for the season.
Many
of you can probably relate to this problem particularly in a society that puts
so much emphasis on consumption.
By
the way, is Santa bringing you an iPhone, or Plasma TV?
I
am hoping for the TV.
As
a form of protest, I usually take my daughters out to Wal-Mart each year so
they can pick out gifts for our school’s “Santa Shop”: an outreach ministry
that provides gifts for needy families.
We
went several weeks ago, so Wal-Mart was not too crowded, but as we made our way
down the aisles, looking for various toys, my youngest child kept pointing out
things that she wanted.
She’s
about five.
I
kept saying in my best calm parent voice, “No today, we are buying gifts for
other people who don’t have Christmas gifts.”
The
true meaning of Christmas, I told her, was learning how to give to others.
This
back and forth exchange went on for about five minutes with plenty of smiling
shoppers walking by my cart and shaking their heads.
Finally,
after I said for about the hundredth time, Christmas is about giving to others.
My
youngest threw up her hands, looked at me, with tears in her eyes, and said, “I
don’t like giving to others.”
Zing. Somehow, children always get to the root of a
spiritual problem.
“I
don’t like giving to others.”
Of course,
to be fair from her perspective, Christmas is all about receiving gifts,
well-meaning parents, grandparents, and various relatives have showered her
with gifts since she first arrived on this planet.…
And,
it is going to take a few more trips to Wal-Mart before I am successful in
getting the true meaning across…
But
her honesty did make me wonder, if we feel any different tonight as we gather
here for worship, “Do we really like giving to others”.
From
my conversations with some of you in the church, I know that folks can often
feel burdened by the gifts that come their way.
The
thank you notes that must be written, the reciprocal gifts that must be
purchased, the trips to Perimeter Mall. (Does
anyone here really understand how those traffic lanes work around the mall?) I always feel like I am taking my life into
my hands.
Let’s
face it buying gifts is a hassle and in
All
these various obligations conspire this time of year to make us feel that we
too, don’t like giving to others.
This
is not because our perspective is necessarily selfish, but because we feel that
exchanging gifts have somehow obscured the true meaning of Christmas.
Christmas
celebrates the birth of our savior, Jesus Christ and our culture has a tendency
to miss this point and jump right to the party.
Yet
tonight, I want to get each of you think about the impulse of giving at
Christmas in another way.
I
want to suggest that part of our problem when it comes to gift giving is that
we are trying to compete with God’s gift to us.
Christmas
celebrates the most amazing and most incredible gift that God ever gave to our
world.
I
love the way that John’s Gospel describes this marvelous gift, the word became
flesh and dwelt among us. Simply put Christmas tells the story of incarnation.
It
reminds folks that our God is a God that of abundant love and great generosity.
The
kind of a God that is able through difficult events: unwed parents, a birth in
a stable among animals and a child hunted by government authorities. God is
able through difficult events to redeem our lives for God’s purpose.
One
reason that we may at times struggle to be generous, to be giving, is that we
feel inadequate to what we have received, as if our own gifts could never
measure up.
Or
as is more often the case, we have been so bruised by the pain of human life;
we don’t feel we deserve that kind of love and that kind of acceptance.
But
this kind of thinking missed the point of Christmas, Christmas reminds us that
somehow in some mysterious way that our human love, our feeble human actions
are more than adequate for God’s purpose.
God
is able through us, through the gift of incarnation to make his good news known
to a suffering world.
Remember the shepherds went to
Their
response to this miracle was to go forth from
Reminding
folks that God loved them and in doing so, the shepherds gave the world a new
kind of gift.
Their
gift was the gift of hope.
Hope,
that despite the uncertainties, the disappointments of human life, God’s gift
this night give us a reason to rejoice, and to learn again how to give of
ourselves to each other.
Speaking
personally, I have never worried about Christmas being too commercial or being
overdone.
Instead,
I worry more that people would grow to ignore it or become apathetic about the
celebration of Christ’s birth.
They
will grow immune to carols, tinsels, and lights and their own human hearts will
grow cold.
The
extravagance of this season, the gift giving, the eggnog, the parties, these
are things that remind us of God’s great love for us.
We
shop, we sing, we feast because buried deep within us is a desire to give to
others.
It
is a desire that we usually manage to stifle but at Christmas, it breaks
through and overcomes even the worst Scrooges in all of us.
Why
do folks spend time and postage sending Christmas cards to each other?
Because we have not entirely lost the sense that we were all created for life with each other in an incarnate world.
Christmas
reminds us that in giving we emulate in some small way what God has chosen to
do for us through the birth of his son, Jesus.
The
celebration and devotion our culture feels for Christmas is not a sign of
despair but a sign of hope, a sign that the great spark God enkindled within us
has not yet been extinguished.
Our
response to this celebration should not be to tell people to stop giving to
each other or complain about the hassle.
Instead
we should invite people to find the true meaning of this night, through the
birth of a tiny babe born in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago.
Hope
and Joy are the church’s message to the world.
My friends, that is the type of gift that we can all learn how to give.
I
don’t like giving to others…Humbug…
On
this night….Thank God that our God did.