A Christmas Sermon

So in the lull after Christmas, I haven't gotten a chance to think of anything particularly profound to say. Instead, here's a rerun of this year's Christmas Eve sermon. We'll see you in the New Year!

I’ve been turning a lot of things around in my head these past few weeks. I know that a lot of people will be waiting for me to say something profound about Christmas, so here it is: God bless the Christmas rush. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen the mobs of people at the mall. Perhaps you’ve sat in traffic backed up along Kenmount Road. Have you felt your blood run cold each time someone asked ‘Are you ready for Christmas?’ I’ve seen a lot of that lately, and still I say God bless it. God bless all the frenzy, the panic, and the madness of the Christmas rush.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t like worrying about whether there will be enough time to get all the shopping done, enough time to get all the packages into the mail, enough time to get the tree up and decorated. I don’t like worrying about how we’re going to pay for it all. And more and more, it seems that as an ordained minister, I’m supposed to be against the commercialization of Christmas.

But you know what? I’m not so convinced any more. There are a lot of problems with the commercial, secular Christmas, but one good thing that it does is this. It forces us to make a choice. Who are we going to serve? Where do our first loyalties really lie?

Let’s face it. It’s hard to be a Christian in the last few weeks before Christmas, when the Christmas rush really gets bad. It’s hard to really act like a Christian when you’re desperately trying to find a parking spot at the mall, or trying to make a left turn on Kenmount Road. It’s hard not to lose your temper. It’s hard not to cuss. It’s hard to turn the other cheek.

That’s the hardest part of Christianity. It’s not always an easy thing to be a Christian. The Bible warns us about that danger. Why do you think St. Paul spent so much time warning Christians ‘Do not be conformed to this world’ if there wasn’t a very real temptation to live like we aren’t good Christians? The temptation to lose your temper and cuss instead of turning the other cheek is there all year long. However, during the Christmas rush, the pressure really comes on, and we feel the temptation more acutely. The question is, how will we react? When faced with a choice between what is easy and what is right, what will we do?

It’s easy to forget that Christianity isn’t easy. We are called to hard work and sacrifice. We are expected to live with different standards, different values, and different priorities than the rest of the world. and the truth is, we can’t expect to win friends and influence people just because we’re Christians. Jesus himself warned us not to be surprised if the world hates us, because it hated him first. Don’t ever forget: Christianity is not a Sunday School picnic. This is a revolution! I’ve always thought C.S. Lewis put it best when he said:

‘Enemy-occupied territory -- that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.’

When Lewis wrote that, it was for part of a series of BBC Radio broadcasts on Christianity during the Second World War. Everyone who would have heard him knew what he was talking about. They were all familiar with the image of the Resistance trying to fight an underground war in Nazi-occupied Europe. Lewis was talking about the tension between the Church and the world. For him, the main opponent to Christianity was a thing called Enlightened Atheism. For us, it’s what you might call Cultural Christianity.

In many ways, this is a problem that we have created for ourselves. For too long, we have tried to convince ourselves that we’re living in a Christian society. We’ve told people to keep Christ in Christmas when they’ve never really been ‘church people’ to begin with. So they dutifully make a nod to Baby Jesus as ‘the reason for the season,’ but there’s no great faith there. We’ve painted a Christian veneer over society, and we get a little put off when that veneer isn’t very thick, and people’s true priorities show through.

For the cultural Christian, for the nominal Christian, Baby Jesus is very important, but only as a name or a symbol, a representative, a cute little mascot that justifies all the fuss and decadence of the holiday season. What they love the most is the example that Jesus sets, or his faith, or his compassion. They’re not worshiping Jesus as the Christ -- only worshiping something about him.

And so when God took human flesh, he came not as a mighty king or a military hero. He came as the lowest of the low, as an absolute nobody. When we peer into the absolute squalor and poverty of the stable in Bethlehem, we are forced to make a decision about him alone. We don’t have the option to worship anything about him, because all his glory and power are stripped away. All we are faced with is his humanity, wrapped in swaddling clothes against the cold.

In the midst of all the noise and the ricketta-racketta of the world around us, in the midst of all the noise, the nastiness, the angry frustrated shoppers and sinful, fallen humanity, we are given a glimpse of God made flesh. You might miss it if you’re not looking carefully, but it is there -- a reminder that God so loved the world that he got personally involved in it. That he came into the world to undo all the brokenness that we cause by our sin. That he took human flesh and shared in our suffering so that he might free us from our slavery to sin and death. ‘And this shall be a sign unto you: ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.’

At the centre of a broken world -- even at the centre of the Christmas rush -- is the mystery of the Incarnation. But that’s just what God did at that first Christmas. This birth doesn’t happen when the house is in order, everyone has cleaned up, and the world is a tidy place. No, Jesus is born into a world every bit as complicated and difficult as ours. What better way for God to break into the world -- not with fanfare and triumph and crowds of people jumping onto the bandwagon, but quietly, secretly, under cover, in such a way as to force us to decide for ourselves whether we will be a part of this revolution that will turn the world upside down, or whether we’ll just be distracted by the noise of the Christmas rush.

So God bless the panic and frenzy that comes at Christmas. I might not enjoy it, but it pushes me to be more intentional about the kind of Christian I’m going to be.

My Own Guilty Forays into Early Christmas, Pt 2

In the last post, I started to admit to some of the few perks of an ever-earlier Christmas bacchanal. Here's the other big one -- I can be a bit of a sucker for Christmas specials. And since the networks start running them as soon as they can, and then drop back to nearly nothing during the actual Christmas season, I guess you've got to get while the getting's good. For the record, I will confess myself guilty to enjoying the following:

• A Christmas Story. Eek. It seems like the quintessential American Christmas movie, second only to Christmas Vacation. The first time I saw it, I hated it, but it's grown on me as time goes by. For movies that count basically as caricatures of themselves, this is a winner. I guess I've got to admit that this is my one nod toward American Thanksgiving: in honour of our three years in the States, we've taking to watching this one on American Thanksgiving -- just as a foretaste of good things to come. (I justify it by arguing that if we're watching it before Advent even starts, it's OK.) If you love this movie (or even if you hate it, but know it too well from over-exposure) check out A Christmas Story in 30 seconds (and Re-enacted by Bunnies).
  

• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, etc. (We should even count the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas in here as well, although it's not the same animation technique.) You've got to love these kind of specials. They're wonderfully dated and kitschy, but that's OK, because really, North American Christmas is stuck in a perpetual 1950s time loop. Emily and I drag out her parents' old Christmas albums (on vinyl) every year for much the same nostalgic high.

• The Muppet Christmas Carol Now, this is a bit of a sad one. Years ago, I convinced a bunch of friends to watch this on my birthday, and it's become an annual tradition that this always gets watched to celebrate my birthday. Unfortunately, in recent years,
  

My Own Guilty Forays into Early Christmas

So perhaps I'll backtrack a little bit and soften the rather judgmental stance I took in my last post about getting Christmas underway too soon. I'll extend some credit to Michael Spencer of internetmonk.com for his recent post: Skip the Carping this Advent. Here's a snippet:

Stay positive this Advent. Even the pagans like the calendars, the music and the candles. Let’s like it all so much that the joy of it overflows into the streets in the middle of the coldest nights. Put away the negativity and include yourself in all those regular folks that God loves enough to come up with this entire Christmas business.

Knowing what Christmas is all about doesn’t add ten points to your score. It just makes it all the more amazing.

But he makes an even better point when he sings the praises of the seasonal nog in True Confessions of an Egg Nog Addict. I read this post, and thought 'That sounds familiar.' I'm a total nog junkie, too, and now that I'm an adult, I may have gotten worse. From the very first time I ever tasted it, I knew this would be my favourite drink in the world.

Denise imagines that egg nog is meant to be “cut” with milk. She is unable to comprehend the ingestion of pure egg nog as a beverage. Like a teetotaler suggesting the bourbon be diluted with lesser substances, she simply doesn’t understand that in the higher levels of addiction, it is blasphemy to dilute sin with any amount of righteousness. Let us have our sin straight. In a tall glass. Oh just give me the bottle.

Amen, brother. I grew up in a family with two younger brothers, and my parents (probably wisely saving the Christmas fund for toys instead of nog) used to insist we mix our egg nog with milk. However, the older we got, the more we realized that it didn't have to be a 50-50 mix. 66-33 would probably do, or even 80-20.

At one point, when I was in high school, I realized that since I had money coming in from delivering papers, there was nothing to stop me from buying my own carton, to drink as I saw fit. So I trudged through the snow, bought a whole litre, and got almost all the way home before I realized the problem. There was no way my parents would let me just drink this egg nog straight. If they found out about it, I'd have to mix it, and I'd probably have to share with my brothers. However, if I just kept it unrefrigerated in my room, it would ruin Christmas awfully quick.

. . . the brighter readers have realized where this is going . . .

So I crouched in a snowbank behind the fence, and drank pretty much the whole carton in somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes. Just thinking of it now makes me a bit sick. As I recall, even though I didn't actually throw up, I regretted it for the rest of the evening. However, the next morning (and any morning thereafter) I'd gladly do it all again!

'Tis the season, Marge! We only get thirty sweet noggy days. Then the government takes it away again.

5 Reasons Why Putting Up the Christmas Decorations in November is Like Premarital Sex

1. Everyone else is doing it, so why can't I?
2. I don't want to come off as a prude, or a kill-joy.
3. That's just not the way that the world works anymore.
4. It's the only way to get ready in time for Christmas.
5. Christmas is good! Why shouldn't I be able to celebrate as soon as I want to?