Christmas Day - "We Need A Little Christmas"

Saint Luke 2: 1-20

Your back!  After a late-night last night gathered around the manger and singing carols.  After falling asleep to the Yule Log on television.  After getting up early on a Monday morning after the latest you’ve been out on a Sunday night in recent memory, you’re back.

May I suggest that, for some of us who have had a very difficult year, we’ve come back because we need a little more Christmas. 

It reminds me of the song from the musical Mame.  Remember the plot?

Auntie Mame was one of New York City’s highest rollers in the big party, bathtub gin days of the roaring twenties.  Her apartment is opulent.  Her dresses are gaudy. And her lifestyle is as outrageous as her behaviour.  She is the personification of the era.

Then came October of 1929. If Auntie Mame was the representative of the glory days, she is also a symbol of the gloom.  One by one we see her garish treasures being removed from her apartment.  No longer able to live on her investments, which are all gone, she has to find a real job.  When she discovers that she is such a failure at this thing called work that she is even unable to sell shoes and her cupboards contains only shredded wheat, she pauses for a moment and announces.

“We need a little Christmas; right this very minute

Candles in the window; carols at the spinet

We need a little Christmas now!”

Mame is looking beyond what is and imagining what might be.

That is what Christmas calls us to do.  It calls us to look beyond the old order which is passing away and imagine an new era that is just beginning.

Saint Luke begins with a symbol of the old order, the government.  “And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.”1

And so it is that the government, the emperor, became an unwitting agent of the Christmas story for this decree moved a young couple temporarily from Nazareth to Bethlehem where the prophets said the Messiah was to be born.

We need a little Christmas because there “will be no Christmas lights in Bethlehem this year.  In solidarity with the suffering in Gaza due to the Israel-Hamas war, last week Christian leaders and municipal authorities in the West Bank city decided to cancel all public festivities. For the first time since modern celebrations began, the birthplace of Jesus will not decorate the Manger Square tree.”2

“I spend my days drinking tea and coffee, waiting for customers who never come. Today, there is no tourism,” a Bethlehem shop owner told The Washington Post.  Still, the religious celebrations shared by the Armenian, Catholic, and Orthodox communities will continue because, said Bethlehem’s Mayor Hana Haniyeh, “So at Midnight Mass this year, we will pray for peace, the message of peace that was founded in Bethlehem when Jesus Christ was born.”3  Even the birthplace of Christ seems to need a little Christmas.

It needed one on that evening long ago when the inns were crowded to overflowing and a young man and woman came to town with no reservations.  Let’s not romanticize them in the bright light of morning.  They had to have been afraid, tired, and feeling very alone like the just got off a bus in a strange city forced to be there by some evil governor. Mary and Joseph may had needed a little assurance that this child really was God’s child.  Mary and Joseph may have needed a little Christmas.

As did those shepherds, “living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.”4  As the late, great, biblical scholar Raymond Brown reminds us: “Far from being regarded as either gentle or noble, in Jesus’ time, shepherds were often considered dishonest, outside of the law.”5

The message of the angels, sung first to the shepherds and then to those of us listening in, is “fear not.”

For some this message may not have come a moment too soon.

There may have been challenges and difficult times in our lives that, like Mary and Joseph, we neither sought or desired.  We’ve lost a friend, a lover, a spouse to death, or separation, or divorce, or alienation, and the aftershocks still leave us reeling.  We may be wondering about the future of our nation’s stability.  We may be needing a little Christmas like we have never needed it before.

With all the power and effect of the heavenly host singing full voice on a hillside, Christmas has come right when we needed it the most. 

Christmas comes with the amazing assertion that, in spite of all present evidence to the contrary that Christ still reigns and that his purposes shall not finally be defeated.

John Killinger said once that “Christmas is the annual reminder of the importance of seeing the miraculous in our midst.”

For when we do, he says, we can see beyond what is and, like Auntie Mame, begin to imagine a new order that is just beginning. 

Christmas points us beyond the mere outward appearances of things, says Killlinger, it is a “Yes, but...” to all of our merely’s.

“Yes, it was merely a stable but...” “Yes, it was merely a noise those shepherds heard but...” “Yes it was merely a star those wise men followed, but...”

Christmas says that nothing is “merely”: not the stable, not the song of the angels, not the shepherds and their sheep, not the star, not the Wise Men and their gifts, not Jesus and his ministry, not the cross on which he died, not the empty tomb in the garden. Everything is charged with the ... grandeur of God if we have but eyes to see and ears to hear.”6

I think that is why we all got up this morning and came to this place.  We came because we needed a little more Christmas.  We needed to be reminded, once again, that Jesus is not just a baby in a manger but a saviour who comes to us in fullness and power every day.

Conclusion

When the warm spell ends and winter sets in and we frozen stiff on old snow like penguins in the arctic, we’ll need a little Christmas.

In April when our government not only counts us but makes us account for every dime we have made, we’ll need a little Christmas.

In spring, and summer, and fall, something will happen, and we’ll need a little Christmas.

And because we have come here, returned to this story, we’ll know where to find it.

Christmas is always here, in Jesus Christ, who stands waiting for us to come to him, embrace his love, and discover that, when we do, our lives have become so much better, richer, fuller that we’ll want to join the chorus of the angels singing, “peace on earth, good will to all.”

We’ve come needing a little Christmas and now we have it.  It’s the ultimate gift that we can use every day.  It is the love of Christ.

Take it.  It’s yours.  Merry Christmas.

______________

1. St. Luke 2:1. (NKJB) [NKJB= The New King James Bible]

2. Jayson Casper, “Christmas Celebrations Canceled in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Jordan,” Christianity Today, November 22, 2023, https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2023/november/bethlehem-christmas-cancelled-israel-gaza-jordan-christians.html.

3. Julia Frankel and Jalel Bwaitel, “Under the Shadow of War in Gaza, Jesus’ Traditional Birthplace Is ...,” The Washington Post, December 16, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/16/bethlehem-west-bank-israel-hamas-war/2fd40b60-9c40-11ee-82d9-be1b5ea041ab_story.html.

4. St. Luke 2:8. (NKJB)

5. Raymond Edward Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (London, ENG: Chapman, 1993), 420.

6. John Killinger, “Recovering Wonder.”  Pulpit Digest. November/December 1991. p. 10.