There's More to Christ than Christmas
First Sunday after Christmas Day (A)
December 30, 2007
Isaiah 61:10—62:3
Psalm 147 :13-21
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1:1-18
What a strange time of year. The first Sunday after Christmas. We’re in the midst of Christmastide, the true Christmas season. It begins on Christmas – actually after sundown on Christmas Eve – and ends with the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord Jesus Christ on January 6. That is, next Sunday.
Well, I say “we’re” in the midst of Christmastide, but you know what the rest of the world says. The Christmas lights have come down, the Christmas sales are over, and Christmas trees are being sunk to the bottom of fishing holes all over the county. Christmas, the world tells us – Christmas is over. I think it ended officially at about 2:45 p.m. Christmas Day. That’s approximately when I discovered that a radio station that had been playing Christmas songs round-the-clock since Thanksgiving had switched back to its regular fare.
All Christmas all the time … until Christmas, that is.
You see, we’re caught in the midst of lots of forces right now. I don’t blame stores for Christmas sales that start in October. They’re just trying to make a living. It does bother me that it resets our clocks – it literally changes our calendars. What we call the Holiday Season isn’t Christmas and New Year’s anymore.
It’s the season that starts just before Halloween and ends at about 2:45 p.m. on New Year’s Day. That’s when one more slice of fruitcake or one more Bowl Game may just push us over the edge. That’s about when thinking that going back to work and sending the kids back to school may not be the worst thing that could happen.
Sometime during this so-called Holiday Season, you probably heard someone say, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every day were Christmas?” Good Lord, no. Don’t misunderstand me. I love Christmas – everything from the Holy Mysteries celebrated at the altar at midnight service all the way to stuffed animals that light up and sing Jingle Bells. And everything in between. But I don’t want Christmas every day. I don’t want Easter every day. I certainly don’t want Lent every day. I don’t want any single thing every day of my life.
A few weeks of tinsel and Christmas Carols is about all I can take. Talk about too much of a good thing. Christmas every day – that would be it.
Now I can practically hear some of you thinking: “Too much of the birth of our Lord? Too much of Jesus? Is that possible?”
Too much Jesus – no, that’s not possible. But there’s a reason we have a liturgical calendar to go alongside our civic calendar. There’s a reason that we celebrate Christmas on one day and Easter on another; the expectancy of the arrival of our Lord in one season, the contemplation of his death on the cross in another. There’s more to our lives than “Happy Birthday.” There’s more to Christianity than “Away in a Manger.”
Too much emphasis on one aspect of our lives throws our lives out of balance – can you imagine every day being final exams or your wedding day or the first day on the job? Our nerves couldn’t take it. And every day a vacation would grow old too. (Though I’m sure we’d all like to try that out to prove them wrong!).
So it’s no surprise that too much emphasis on one aspect of our Christian faith throws our very beings out of balance. And more than that, it gives us a distorted view of our faith and of the nature of Christ himself.
Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, gives us a hint of what this is all about. He says that the received faith taught us one way of showing respect and obedience unto the Lord until the arrival of Jesus Christ. “[T]he Law was our disciplinarian until Christ came,” he tells us. The Law of Moses was meant to keep us on the straight and narrow, to give us the ways and means of expressing our devotion and treating one another equitably, of guaranteeing the Lord’s favor.
But Paul tells us that God and the world were not standing still. There was more to faith than the Law. There was Jesus and his saving power, which would not be expressed at all times in the same manner. He was with us in the beginning, is with us now, and will be with us at the end. But, Paul reminds us, not in the same way. A time would come when God would send his Son to be born of a woman, born under the law, in order redeem those who were under the law. And that was Christmas Day. The day when the world changed, when our plan of salvation was opened up for us – a day unlike any other. A day of a particular manifestation of our Lord and his grace for all of us, but not the only day of the year.
This is what John tells us in the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
Jesus, the Word, has always been with us. But we do not celebrate the birth of Creation every day, even though the Word was with God and the Word was God at that very moment, the moment that made all things in this world possible. No, to concentrate too much on the beginning – whether the beginning of the world or the beginning of Jesus’ ministry on earth – too much beginning and we miss the middle and the end and the beginning to come.
John says, “[T]he Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
Too much beginning and we miss this – the ministry of Jesus on earth, the stories and parables and miracles and prayers that we study during that long green season, the Season after Pentecost.
Thinking about Christmas in this way helps me to see the importance of Christmas—that it is a brilliant manifestation of God on earth, the breaking through of the holy to this land of tears and sorrows. A signal that we are not alone, that Jesus came to earth once and he will come again.
He will come again. That is what we’re likely to forget if we were to concentrate only on the Nativity, on thinking of Jesus as only the babe in the manger. Remember that “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” It is through his this absolutely undeserved grace that we are able to begin at Christmas and look through the ministry of Jesus to the Cross – the Cross and the Resurrection.
Every funeral, we say, is a resurrection service. Every Sunday, we say, is Easter celebrated anew. Christmas without the looming Cross on Calvary is just another holiday. Christmas without the promise of the resurrection is merely tinsel and frosting, not worth serious consideration.
So thank God that every day is not Christmas, and every day is not any one single element of the birth, death, and resurrection of our Lord. But by him, and with him, and in him – every day of our lives, we are brought nearer to him. For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace, on this day, in this life, and in the next.
Amen.
December 30, 2007
Isaiah 61:10—62:3
Psalm 147 :13-21
Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7
John 1:1-18
What a strange time of year. The first Sunday after Christmas. We’re in the midst of Christmastide, the true Christmas season. It begins on Christmas – actually after sundown on Christmas Eve – and ends with the Feast of the Epiphany of Our Lord Jesus Christ on January 6. That is, next Sunday.
Well, I say “we’re” in the midst of Christmastide, but you know what the rest of the world says. The Christmas lights have come down, the Christmas sales are over, and Christmas trees are being sunk to the bottom of fishing holes all over the county. Christmas, the world tells us – Christmas is over. I think it ended officially at about 2:45 p.m. Christmas Day. That’s approximately when I discovered that a radio station that had been playing Christmas songs round-the-clock since Thanksgiving had switched back to its regular fare.
All Christmas all the time … until Christmas, that is.
You see, we’re caught in the midst of lots of forces right now. I don’t blame stores for Christmas sales that start in October. They’re just trying to make a living. It does bother me that it resets our clocks – it literally changes our calendars. What we call the Holiday Season isn’t Christmas and New Year’s anymore.
It’s the season that starts just before Halloween and ends at about 2:45 p.m. on New Year’s Day. That’s when one more slice of fruitcake or one more Bowl Game may just push us over the edge. That’s about when thinking that going back to work and sending the kids back to school may not be the worst thing that could happen.
Sometime during this so-called Holiday Season, you probably heard someone say, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every day were Christmas?” Good Lord, no. Don’t misunderstand me. I love Christmas – everything from the Holy Mysteries celebrated at the altar at midnight service all the way to stuffed animals that light up and sing Jingle Bells. And everything in between. But I don’t want Christmas every day. I don’t want Easter every day. I certainly don’t want Lent every day. I don’t want any single thing every day of my life.
A few weeks of tinsel and Christmas Carols is about all I can take. Talk about too much of a good thing. Christmas every day – that would be it.
Now I can practically hear some of you thinking: “Too much of the birth of our Lord? Too much of Jesus? Is that possible?”
Too much Jesus – no, that’s not possible. But there’s a reason we have a liturgical calendar to go alongside our civic calendar. There’s a reason that we celebrate Christmas on one day and Easter on another; the expectancy of the arrival of our Lord in one season, the contemplation of his death on the cross in another. There’s more to our lives than “Happy Birthday.” There’s more to Christianity than “Away in a Manger.”
Too much emphasis on one aspect of our lives throws our lives out of balance – can you imagine every day being final exams or your wedding day or the first day on the job? Our nerves couldn’t take it. And every day a vacation would grow old too. (Though I’m sure we’d all like to try that out to prove them wrong!).
So it’s no surprise that too much emphasis on one aspect of our Christian faith throws our very beings out of balance. And more than that, it gives us a distorted view of our faith and of the nature of Christ himself.
Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, gives us a hint of what this is all about. He says that the received faith taught us one way of showing respect and obedience unto the Lord until the arrival of Jesus Christ. “[T]he Law was our disciplinarian until Christ came,” he tells us. The Law of Moses was meant to keep us on the straight and narrow, to give us the ways and means of expressing our devotion and treating one another equitably, of guaranteeing the Lord’s favor.
But Paul tells us that God and the world were not standing still. There was more to faith than the Law. There was Jesus and his saving power, which would not be expressed at all times in the same manner. He was with us in the beginning, is with us now, and will be with us at the end. But, Paul reminds us, not in the same way. A time would come when God would send his Son to be born of a woman, born under the law, in order redeem those who were under the law. And that was Christmas Day. The day when the world changed, when our plan of salvation was opened up for us – a day unlike any other. A day of a particular manifestation of our Lord and his grace for all of us, but not the only day of the year.
This is what John tells us in the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”
Jesus, the Word, has always been with us. But we do not celebrate the birth of Creation every day, even though the Word was with God and the Word was God at that very moment, the moment that made all things in this world possible. No, to concentrate too much on the beginning – whether the beginning of the world or the beginning of Jesus’ ministry on earth – too much beginning and we miss the middle and the end and the beginning to come.
John says, “[T]he Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
Too much beginning and we miss this – the ministry of Jesus on earth, the stories and parables and miracles and prayers that we study during that long green season, the Season after Pentecost.
Thinking about Christmas in this way helps me to see the importance of Christmas—that it is a brilliant manifestation of God on earth, the breaking through of the holy to this land of tears and sorrows. A signal that we are not alone, that Jesus came to earth once and he will come again.
He will come again. That is what we’re likely to forget if we were to concentrate only on the Nativity, on thinking of Jesus as only the babe in the manger. Remember that “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” It is through his this absolutely undeserved grace that we are able to begin at Christmas and look through the ministry of Jesus to the Cross – the Cross and the Resurrection.
Every funeral, we say, is a resurrection service. Every Sunday, we say, is Easter celebrated anew. Christmas without the looming Cross on Calvary is just another holiday. Christmas without the promise of the resurrection is merely tinsel and frosting, not worth serious consideration.
So thank God that every day is not Christmas, and every day is not any one single element of the birth, death, and resurrection of our Lord. But by him, and with him, and in him – every day of our lives, we are brought nearer to him. For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace, on this day, in this life, and in the next.
Amen.
posted by Michael+ at 12:20 PM
