I don’t know why it is. I always seem to have problems putting together a Christmas sermon. I read over the texts, and I love to read them, but what can one say about them that is new and fresh? As I do my background work, studying the text, reading the many commentaries that surround my desk, I feel numbed. I have read them all before. It’s like I have taken them in and been inoculated from catching a full dose of Christmas. And the writer’s itch that usually inspires me, and sometimes compels me to write, seems to have mystically received a dose of calamine lotion. Every year it seems to be the same.
This year is no different. For hours I sit between the scripture text and a blank page, lost in sermon Never Never Land. For hours more, my creative mind is in turmoil as I ponder; when I drive, when I stare at the Christmas tree joyfully lighting up our living room, when I lie awake in the small hours of the night in my bed. What Christmas message can I bring from God’s word? What I am looking for, in fact pleading in prayer for, is a large idea, a strikingly fresh concept concerning the birth of Jesus.
The text I am thinking about is Luke Chapter 2, more specifically the angel’s words to the shepherds on the first Christmas: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” I am focusing on the three titles: Saviour, Christ, and Lord. In fact, I am doing a detailed word study, hoping that this futile linguistic excavation will somehow produce the ore from which I can refine a sermon. But my mind wanders, as it often has a bad habit of doing, to the last part of the text that I am working on, to Mary’s response to what the shepherds told her. The words draw me in: “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”
Pondered them in her heart… pondered them in her heart… pondered them in her heart. The phrase goes on and on, over and over in my head. It is getting in the way of the theological digging I am trying to do. And so I quit and turn off the computer on which I am trying to write. Sleep is my hoped-for release.
But the phrase won’t leave me alone: “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” What words had Mary been pondering in her heart? I have to go back to the text to make sure. The light goes on. I check the text. It makes it clear to me that Mary was pondering in her heart the words the shepherds had received from the angel concerning her newborn son: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” The light goes off.
The phrase still will not leave me alone: “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” It goes on and on, over and over in my head until it becomes a command, “ponder the words in my heart.” And somehow in the night’s dark furnace I find the angel’s words, which became the shepherd’s words, which became the words that Mary pondered in her heart, and they get lodged in my heart, too. And whether I want to or not, I am pondering them in the centre of my being: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”
And a strange thing happens. Gradually the focus changes from the large theological words of Saviour, Christ and Lord to a small word with little apparent theological significance. The little word, you.
“To you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, who is Christ, the Lord. To you is born… to you is born… to you….
To me? To me is born? To me is born a Saviour, Christ, Lord?
The light goes on. The message of Christmas is found for me afresh and anew. That very old and small but precious message, that message that penetrates my heart now as it must have penetrated the hearts of shepherds, the heart of Mary, the hearts of wise men, some 2,000 years ago. The baby in the manger is not about abstract, lofty theological ideas. In fact, such things may well cover the precious, fresh revelation of Christmas like so much overburden.
It is so clear and new to me now. It’s all about an all-powerful, creating, loving and saving God, choosing to show me the depth, width and height of His love by coming in human flesh. And the poignancy of this act is that He does it for me. And as this realization soaks in, what the babe in the manger reveals is that I am, that you are, that the world is, loved and known intimately by God almighty, one person at a time.
The Christmas message is one that uses God’s self-revelation in the baby Jesus to help you and me to move from thinking of God as part of our lives to the startling realization that we are forever a part of God’s life. That we are forever on the mind of God. That we are forever before His throne of grace. That the oft-termed “Christ Event” is about God who knows us personally from the very beginning of time, reaching out with the arms of the Christ child saying, “Do you believe me yet? I love you personally with a passion that defies human experience. I am born for you in a manger in Bethlehem.”
Christmas; the birth of a saving, anointed Lord, who comes not to condemn you, rather to reach out to you in a profound personal way that cannot help but wake you up to the fact of God’s individual and personal love for you. Unto you is born this day … your Saviour … your Messiah/Christ … your Lord. It’s deeply personal and universal.
There is a bumper sticker that reads, “Jesus is the reason for the season.” And I know now that nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus is not the reason for the season. You are the reason for the season. The season is all about you … all about me … all about God loving us all, one person at a time. The words ring loud and true: “… to you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, who is Christ, the Lord.”
