Hebrews 2:10-18; Isaiah 63:7-9; Matthew 2:13-23
It’s the fifth day of Christmas. Have you got your five gold rings yet? Christmas isn’t over. The twelve days of Christmas continue right up to the Day of Epiphany, January 6.
We used to leave town on December 26th to go to grandparents. We always saw abandoned Christmas trees shivering at the curbside under powdered snow. All the build-up to Christmas and then it is over and gone, forgotten in a day. When I was growing up, I could usually get a few days play out of a toy after Christmas before it would break. And it was said that the changed Ebenezer Scrooge kept Christmas all year.
Still, I feel odd going into a Christmas shop in the middle of July. And the assault of Christmas music in October is like the early blizzard for which I am not ready. So even if you aren’t interested in a partridge in a pear tree and everything else that is supposed to come with it, I don’t want to pack up Christmas just yet. In fact, I am ready to unwrap it.
The reality of pre-Christmas is that the much too early music acts like a kind of lullaby. The bright lights mesmerize us. The images of the season – non-Christian and Christian alike – are like an opiate dulling the senses. We spend much of the month or two before Christmas in a drug-induced stupor that not even the Thanksgiving turkey tryptophan can rival. We are eager for the midnight sale-a-thons on “black” Friday. We relish the quaintness of small business Saturday. We glow like the computer monitors we stare at on “cyber” Monday. We are inoculated against the traffic on Chillicothe’s Bridge Street or at Easton Town Center. Like the hunters in our far-distant ancestry, we rise to the challenge of last minute shopping.
Then it is all over. It’s the morning after the night before. Reality sets in. Not just the credit card bills, but also the clean-up. Down comes the lights, the tinsel, the tree, the stockings, the wreathes. The Christmas bender is over. We clear it all away in hopes that we can sober up quickly. Like a spurned lover we get rid of all the things that remind us of the times that once were good.
Some of you are thinking that I must have gotten a truck load of coal to go on a Scrooge-like rant. No. I love Christmas. Forgive me for preferring to celebrate it after December 25th rather than before. A lot a good, kind, wonderful, generous things go on in the heady days that lead up to Christmas Day. I just think that lots of people – even faithful Christians – are so caught up in the mechanics of the celebration that they forget the bedrock foundation for Christmas. And whether we dismantle the holiday on December 26th or January 6th, reality, normalcy, true life returns.
The euphoria of Christmas hasn’t completely died away, the novocaine of “Noels” hasn’t completely worn off. Our scripture readings today remind us that the world we live in is not the peaceful kingdom that the Isaiah reading sang about on the First Sunday of Advent. And the reading from Matthew – out of step in our mental chronology of Jesus’ birth – grates like fingernails on a chalkboard.
But this is Christmas unwrapped. The world is like the debris strewn area around the Christmas tree after all the packages and gift bags have been torn into. The bows, discarded gift tags, shredded paper, and boxes litter a scene that once was idyllic and festive. We live in world in the long-lived aftermath of a super storm called Haiyan, or tsunami in Japan, or an earthquake in Haiti; of a Mexican Gulf oil spill, a volcanic eruption, or car bombings in Afghanistan or Iraq; of a factory fire in Bangladesh, a mall assault in Kenya, or a school shooting in Colorado.
Some will say, like Auntie Mame, that we need a little Christmas to get us through the terrors of life. We like the story of the British and German troops pausing to celebrate Christmas together on the battlefield in World War I before resuming the trench warfare the next day. We need joy in the midst of despair, we need levity to counteract the gravity of the 24-hour news feed on our I-Pads, smart phones and televisions.
And that is exactly why we need Christmas unwrapped. The reading from the Letter to the Hebrews gives us not only joy but also reality. It provides a solid reference point in a sea of uncertainty. It offers hope and assurance when the nagging doubts and questions return.
Christmas – the Incarnation, really – is a holy mystery. It can be said in simple words,:
• In Christ, God became one of us.
• In Christ, God is with us in our suffering.
• In Christ, we have been freed from the fear of death.
Simple words, yet complex ideas that need to be unwrapped carefully, slowly, deliberately, like an extravagantly wrapped, delicate Christmas gift. Which it is.
God became one of us. We take that for granted. The only thing we know is us. Which is why we so often picture Jesus by what we see in the mirror or by who we see around us most of the time. In reality, it is only one chromosome that determines our gender, and a very tiny percentage of the genes that determine our height, weight, eye color, skin tone, weakness to allergens of any kind, or precondition for chronic, debilitating, or life-shortening disease.
We should be humbled that God chose humanity as the life-form through which God would relate to us. God honored human beings by becoming one of them. We human beings have a poor history with God. We have second-guessed God’s intentions for us. We have ignored God’s commands to us. We have turned dominion into domination and scarred the earth. We have beaten, subjugated, imprisoned, tortured people like us as well as people different from us. We have fought and killed fellow people for very poor reasons and for no reason at all. We have fabricated stories and illusions and sold them to ourselves to keep us from believing the truth.
There are plenty of good reasons why Jesus would be ashamed to become one of us. Everything he is, we are not. But instead of dwelling on all the things that are different, Jesus chose to celebrate our common spiritual heritage. He will not deny that we are his sisters and brothers. He is one of the descendants of Abraham and Sarah who are as numerous as the stars. Introverts and extroverts, loners and party-ers, we are the “us” whom God is with in Jesus.
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews declares quite plainly that God used “experiences of suffering to make perfect [Christ as] the pioneer of salvation.” Because Christ is one of us, the One who suffered on the cross is one with God and one with us in our sufferings. God is in the midst of sorrow, suffering, pain, agony, illness, grief: the sorrow of the man in Columbus who accidentally ran over his infant son; the suffering people in Syria and South Sudan caught between government and rebel forces; the agony of the people of Tacloban and other parts of Philippines after super typhoon Haiyan; the grief of the people of Newtown, Connecticut, and the families of victims of the Sandy Hook School shooting; the inconvenience of the people of Michigan. Maine, and other places in the lingering power outages.
God became incarnate – human flesh and blood – in Jesus not that suffering would be removed, but that suffering would be fully embraced in Christ. Jesus suffers completely. We do not suffer alone. He leads the way in bearing our suffering. Our suffering doesn’t go away. Nor should we look for ways to suffer. Rather in suffering we may find ourselves closer to Jesus and more appreciative of his saving grace.
Part of that saving grace is that we have been liberated from the fear of death. Jesus suffered right up to the cross and on the cross he suffered death. But death didn’t have the last word. Jesus was born that “we no more may die” as the Christmas hymn says. Resurrection and ascension confirm that death has no power. We can cringe at the suffering and agony that goes on in every part of the world. But our cringing is not from fear of death but from empathy with fellow sufferers. We shake off the cringing and stand firm knowing that no matter what pain and suffering may happen, no matter how horrific it might be, God triumphs for us through Christ.
Christmas is more than all the seasonal trappings that buoy us through the last months of the year. Christmas unwrapped is life eternal with the one who has suffered for us, who suffers with us in all the downs of life, and who will bring us with him into the radiant glory of God’s eternal rule. You won’t need a gift receipt for God’s love. One size fits all and it goes with every color imaginable. And the guarantee never runs out.
Thanks be to God.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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