God’s Christmas Surprise

Over my years as a minister, I’ve heard about and experienced various different styles of children’s Christmas pageants. At the church I served in Unionville, Ontario, the baby Jesus was always “played” by the most recently born child in the church. It didn’t matter if the baby was brown, black, yellow or white. It didn’t matter if the baby was a boy or a girl. It didn’t matter whether the baby was placid and calm or a colicky screamer. The newest baby was entitled to the honour of portraying Jesus in the Christmas pageant. It didn’t always go as smoothly as we hoped it would. However, we never had a screaming baby drown out the entire pageant, or a nine-year-old Mary drop the new born baby Jesus on his or her head … but you never quite knew what to expect.

Now, a friend of mine tells me that in his church, they used to go the baby route, but some people just got so upset with the baby crying or worried so much about what might go wrong, they bought a beautiful baby Jesus doll. They would put this doll in the manger – in the straw. Then they would put a flashlight under the doll so it would glow out of the straw, and everybody would know that this baby is different from every other baby in the world. But it was a doll, and they liked using a doll because they didn’t want any trouble. They didn’t want any noise – didn’t want a child to wake up and start to cry, then people would get upset because you couldn’t hear the littlest angel’s choir singing. So, to save any trouble, they just used a doll.

But now, let me tell you about the one that absolutely “takes the cake!” They have a baby contest. This minister told me, “Every year we have a baby contest, and we choose the most beautiful baby in the community to play Jesus.”

It had to be a pretty baby. My goodness, you wouldn’t want a baby that was ugly or with some birth defect or sick playing Jesus. It had to be the winner of the baby contest. The community babies were assessed by a panel of judges, and the most perfect – the most beautiful baby in the town was put in the manger at Christmas to play Jesus.

We want Christmas to be perfect,and we all have in our minds an image of the perfect Christmas. I have it, you have at it, Chevy Chase had it in the movie Christmas Vacation. It probably looks something like a warm and loving family gathered around the fireplace - logs burning on the hearth, spruce Christmas tree adorned with tinsel, soft coloured lights and candy canes. The smell of Christmas cookies and turkey wafting through the house and the crooning voice of Bing Crosby singing White Christmas softly in the background. Children’s stockings stuffed with goodies, the gifts scattered around the foot of the tree.

It’s easy to imagine the perfect Christmas, isn’t it? This season is so full of nostalgia and so ripe with hope and expectation. It takes a real Scrooge with a heart of stone not to become excited about this, the most magical season of the year, where visions of sugar plums, or their modern equivalent, dance in all our heads. But, there have been times – times when Christmas has been a bit of a disappointment. We’ve hoped or dreamed for some kind of perfect Christmas, and it didn’t come true.

Maybe you were expecting someone home for Christmas, and he or she couldn’t make it. Maybe you were looking for a bonus in your pay envelope, and it wasn’t there. Maybe you were hoping to feel warm and secure in the bosom of your family, and instead a family fight broke out. Maybe you didn’t receive a present you were hoping for. Maybe you were expecting a “Christmas-y” mood or feeling that never quite arrived. Have you had that experience? I have.

I remember 1978. Just a few days before Christmas, I came down with the worst sore throat of my life. I was running a fever and developed a rash. I went to my family doctor – the one I’d had since childhood – old Doctor Wright. His wife Ruth was his receptionist, nurse and assistant. Now old Doctor Wright was half deaf and a chain smoker.

There I was in his office, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, when he says to me, in a loud and booming voice, “It looks like you’ve got Scarlet Fever – it’s a mild version, but you’re going to need to stay away from people for the next few days!” Then he raises his voice even louder – so everyone in the waiting room can hear – he calls to his wife, “Hey Ruthie, you need to come in here and see this, he’s got Scarlet Fever!” It was not the best Christmas of my life. Christmas can be that way, a disappointment.

And we can build up such impossible hopes and dreams, they cannot possibly be fulfilled. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons people can feel so depressed when Christmas is over. We’ve lived for days or weeks in a state of constant busy-ness and perpetual excitement, expecting something to happen – looking for the perfect Christmas, and when it doesn’t come about in the way we’d hoped or dreamed, we feel sad or let down. And no matter what other happy or wondrous or joyous things might occur, we dwell on what didn’t happen the way we wanted.

We long for the perfect Christmas. We want to experience family, love, faith, God, joy, mystery and wonder. And no doubt, all the people with whom we share time over the Christmas season – from those who sell us the gifts, right through to the special someone for whom we buy the gift – everyone is looking for the perfect Christmas. Everyone wants to experience the wondrous emotions of Christmas. We all want the same thing, and unfortunately, we may even be willing to scheme and plan, to fight and claw, to demand and confront – to crush the opposition of any person or circumstances thwarting our attempt to engineer the perfect Christmas for 2025.

“God help anyone who stands in my way!”

I remember years ago I went out to get dinner rolls for the Christmas Day feast at our home, but it was Christmas Eve and I’d left it too late. No one seemed to have anything left. Finally, I ended up at a small corner bakery. They had one more rack of dinner rolls to bring out. There were ten or twenty of us determined to get those rolls. We needed them or our Christmas dinners would be ruined.

They rolled out that last rack. They said to us, “Be careful, it is extremely hot.”

And then, two seconds later, there I was diving into this rack of buns along with everyone else – pushing, grabbing, shoving to get those last few dinner rolls – burning my hand on the tray, when suddenly I thought to myself, “What am I doing? What in God’s name am I doing?”

We so desperately want to engineer the perfect Christmas.

And that’s really unfortunate, because you know what the real message of Christmas is about? It’s about what we don’t expect. It’s about what we can’t do. It’s about what we can’t plan for, or engineer, to have happen.

The first Christmas was just like that. It’s the story of Mary unexpectedly becoming the mother of God. It’s about Joseph having that surprising news shared with him - that his fiancée is pregnant, and he’s not the father. It’s the story of living in a country occupied by a foreign army. And in the late stages of her pregnancy, Mary and Joseph must travel to Bethlehem so Emperor Caesar Augustus can conduct a census. And this isn’t a census to get vital statistical information. It’s not to make sure everyone has the chance to vote in the upcoming election. It’s for only one purpose – so new and even heavier taxes can be imposed on the people of Palestine.

It’s a story about shepherds – wandering nomads – nobodies - who were finally settling down for a night in the fields, when suddenly they’re awakened – terrified - discovering the night sky filled with angels. It’s about the magi looking for the baby Jesus, but running into a ruthless and scheming man – King Herod – intent only on murdering a potential new rival to the throne. And it’s about those same Magi, finding the Lord of the universe, not in a palace, but in a stable in a poor little country village called Bethlehem.

God comes to us as the quiet whisper of a birth in a barn – a mother singing a lullaby to a baby. A baby that is subject to the elements – spitting up milk, needing his diaper changed, being wrapped up against the winter cold, subject to every germ and disease, nestling there trying to sleep among the sheep and goats, and this is God’s surprising and unexpected move on the world.

Do you think God’s going to be able to save the world this way?

You know what I wonder about every Christmas? Whenever Christmas comes and I think, into a world of violence and power and money and extraordinary waste and wealth, and extreme poverty and pain and suffering … Jesus comes … I have to remember who he was and his message of peace, love and justice. And then I have to re-define myself and my place in the universe - who I am, and what I should expect from God, of life, of Christmas

God is a surprise. God surprised everyone that first Christmas. And God continues to surprise us and deliver the unexpected, even in the midst of our trying to accomplish the perfect Christmas. That is the way God moves and acts in the world.

So let me tell you a secret: it isn’t a matter of what we’re expecting for Christmas. It’s what we don’t expect. That’s what we ought to be looking for, because that’s the way God is. God is a God of surprises.

I don’t have anything against traditional Christmas celebrations. I love them! I enjoy the trees and the lights and the Christmas pageants and Christmas music, and gift-giving. But is it possible to think about what surprises God may have in store for you this Christmas? God may not come to us in the old familiar ways. God may speak to us in some new event – in some new place, where we least expect it.

Theologian, Robert Brown says, “As I look back on my life, the greatest things that ever happened to me were things I never expected – things I didn’t plan for, things that didn’t seem like a blessing at the time. To speak of God’s grace is to say the things most worth expecting are the things that are unexpected.” So perhaps we need to become a little wiser and set aside the search for “the perfect Christmas” – at least if we’re demanding that perfection on our own terms.

Is it possible for us to look for God in places we never thought to look – in our failures and burdens and losses; in the Christmas baking that didn’t turn out quite right, the person we didn’t hear from, the guest who didn’t come, the job we lost, the course we flunked, the relationship we botched, in the illness keeping us in bed, or the party we weren’t invited to attend, or the Christmas gift we didn’t get? Who knows, maybe looking back from the perspective of the years, we’ll think, “That was the best Christmas ever!”

The Christmas surprises of God are as old as the birth of the baby Jesus – we never know where they are or who will bring them, or when they’re coming. But the promise of scripture is “they’re coming” and it won’t be what we expect! And experiencing them and living them, may just be what the perfect Christmas is all about.