Christmas Feelings

Last Sunday evening after Judy and I finished decorating our Christmas Tree – red and gold are this year’s colours - I had the relaxing experience of sitting back in my chair and enjoying the tree. I had some old Bing Crosby Christmas music playing softly in the background, and it was a very pleasant moment. The feelings of peace and good will toward all, filled me with this warm fuzzy glow of Christmas spirit.

As I relaxed there, I began to think about all the Christmas services still needing to be planned and written before the end of the year. And it occurred to me, I would love to be able to package up in a sermon the feeling I was experiencing right in that moment. How might I communicate that feeling in a sermon? How with mere words might I bring all of you into that same warm fuzzy glow of Christmas? Because, I suppose, beyond all the shopping and decorating and parties, what we most want to experience at Christmas is "the right feeling.".

But of course, when we begin to think about it, we have to ask ourselves, "What is the right feeling? What is the right emotion for us to experience at this time of year?"

Maybe there's more than one feeling making up the Christmas spirit. Well of course there is! The question is, which of those feelings do we want to experience in a church service during the days leading up to Christmas? Is this sanctuary a place where we want to escape from the real world and enter only into the mystery and wonder of angels and shepherds, a sparkling star and a manger?

It sounds great, all warm and sentimental for Christmas, but we're smart enough to know, we don't live in a warm and sentimental world. We live in a world of hunger, a world of terror - a world where the citizens of Ukraine are being systematically bombed - a world of terrorists and car accidents - of cancer and violence even within the home.

Now, can we just pretend none of that exists - When you walk in the doors of this church, just leave all that rotten stuff outside! - if I do that, if I refuse to acknowledge the sadness, distress and despair of so many during this "joyous season" - if I do that, am I, as the person standing in the pulpit – am I doing my job? Am I being faithful to God? Am I being faithful to the message of Christmas?

Do we come into this sanctuary hoping Christmas will allow us to escape the trouble in the world? Or, or, do we come into this sanctuary hoping the message of Christmas will help us to resolve the trouble in the world. Because, if it's the first one - if it's "escape" - we're no better off when we leave this place, than when we first walked in here. The world's troubles and our own personal troubles, are waiting just outside that door. So I have actually set myself a much harder task during this season of Advent. I’ve set myself the challenge of preaching sermons that will "hold their own" in the face of the realities of life. I suspect we're all too clever for anything else to work …

This morning we read the traditional Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke. This story tells us, two thousand years ago, some shepherds were out in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. Now let's not sanitize those shepherds. They were completely unlike the cute little group of children, dressed up in bathrobes and towels, we’ve seen so many times in the Sunday School Christmas pageant. When we read the Gospel of Luke, we need to think of shepherds who are dirty, unshaven, tangled hair, food stuck in their beards, exuding a rather unpleasant odour. There was no other way to be when you spent your life hanging out with sheep in a mucky, trampled down field. After all, a bunch of guys away for a "boy's weekend" can pretty much fit the above description! Imagine it ten times worse!

On top of this rather unsavoury physical description, or perhaps, because of it, they were also outcasts from their own people. The Jewish religion labelled them as “unclean” because their way of life prevented them from following the 613 individual statutes of the Jewish law. They were rejected by their own society and by their own religious leaders and institutions. They were throwaway, disposable people.

And yet the story tells us, it was to those shepherds that the miraculous birth of the Christ child was first proclaimed. It was for the misfits of society that the angels sang - for the poor, dirty, oppressed shepherds. They were the ones to first appear at the door of the stable. Which is as it should be, because the family they came to see were "displaced" people themselves - displaced by the whims of a governmental bureaucracy - an empire - that had no concern for a pregnant woman; made no allowances for the accommodation of the poor. This story does not gloss over the harshness and cruelty of life!

So we need to ask ourselves, why does the author of the Gospel of Luke do this to us? The Gospel of Mark just skips right over the whole birth narrative. The Gospel of John begins with a story of light and dark in heavenly places and the eternal word. But now, the author of Luke - he rubs our nose in the whole ugly and sordid tale - Why!?

I think he tells us this story for two reasons. First of all, it affirms the poor and the oppressed. This story says God stands in solidarity with people who are in the same situation as Mary and Joseph and the shepherds - displaced, poor, uneducated, struggling just to survive. This story tells us God does not discriminate on the basis of those qualities. They don't matter to God. In God's eyes we are all equal - equally cared for and equally valued and precious to God.

Let me tell you a story. A friend of mine was telling me, many years ago, when he was a boy, his youth group used to collect money for the poor and needy. They’d put together Christmas hampers to give to poor families. During the week before Christmas, they would load up the cars and they would drive around to the doors of needy people. When they would come to a home, one of the kids would get a hamper out of the trunk, he would take it up to the door and set it down just outside the door. He would knock or ring the door bell, and when he heard someone coming to the door, he'd yell out "Merry Christmas!" and run back to the car and drive away. They wanted to be humble and anonymous about the whole thing. After they delivered all the hampers, they’d go to the local dairy bar and buy big thick milkshakes and think about how good they were.

One time, my friend said, it was his turn to take the hamper up to the door. They were in a really needy part of town - poor, poor housing.

Everybody was in the car saying to him, "Hurry up! Hurry!"

He goes up to the house, puts the hamper down and knocks at the door. No answer.

The kids back in the car are all yelling to him, "Hurry!"

He looks back at them and yells, "Nobody's coming!" But then, when he turns back to the door, he finds himself face to face with another young boy. Their faces are two inches apart.

The boy says, "Hi!"

My friend tells me, he said, "Hi!"

But this wasn't the plan.

The mother comes to the door and she sees the Christmas hamper, and she says, "Come in. My name is Mrs. Johnson."

Well, now he really doesn't know what to do, so he steps inside.

The boy at the door picks up the hamper and brings it into his house. He rifles through the hamper and pulls out two apples. He starts to eat one of the apples himself and hands the other one to my friend.

By now, my friend is in a state of panic! He’s thinking, "This is not how it's supposed to work. I'm supposed to be helping the poor, and he's giving me back my own stuff!"

But then, he says, he had a revelation. He said, I will never forget the moment when I realized, “All of us eat from the same hamper , nobody is better than anybody else, we all eat together at the same table.”

The Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke raises the status and the importance of the poor and the outcast. It reminds us, "We are all equal in the mind and heart of God."

Now, I said this passage in Luke does two things - let me tell you about that second thing. Later in the Gospel of Luke, we find these words on the lips of Jesus:

"From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded."

Now, I know all of us have our worries, our anxieties and our fears. Living in a world like ours, that can't help but be the case. But you and I both know, in our global community we are the ones "to whom much has been given," and from whom "much will be required." We citizens of one of the richest countries in the world, are invited, perhaps even obligated, to share our wealth of knowledge and material possessions with those who are in need. When I think of the stories of the birth of Jesus, we who are wealthy are not out of place at the stable door. It’s not just the shepherds who came to worship the Christ child.

In the Gospel of Matthew we are told wealthy princes - Magi - from the east - came to search for the Christ child. But here's the difference. The shepherds came as they were. They came in search of hope and the promise of a better world. The gifts they brought to the Holy family were their gifts of wonder, adoration and worship. The Magi had to bring gifts, those to whom much has been given, cannot appear in Bethlehem empty handed.

When we go to Bethlehem, when we look down into the eyes of that infant lying in a manger, we need to recognize, he’s making demands upon us.

Could he be saying, "Don't let children be born like me. Don't ignore the cries of the hungry and the oppressed, the disabled and the unemployed. I come in the name of a God who sees each person as valuable and precious. I come in the name of a God who loves each person as if there were only one to love."

Could it be, when we truly encounter the eyes of this infant king, we know this: Our lives can never be the same again.

There are lots of different feelings we experience at Christmas time, they're all okay, just, please, don't miss this the feelings of deep generosity and compassion - don't miss those on your way to Bethlehem.