Sermon: Doing Christmas Right

 Luke 2:8-20
Doing Christmas Right
James Sledge                                                                            December 24, 2023 

The fact that Christmas Eve coincides with a Sunday creates a busy day for choirs, volunteers, and church staff, and I suspect that most such folks prefer Christmas Eve to be on another day of the week. The only thing I prefer even less is for Christmas to be on a Sunday. That means being at the church late on Saturday evening, then running home for any sort of last minute Christmas Eve activities at the house before being back at church the next morning with the small group of hardy souls who will show up on a Christmas Sunday.

Many years ago, when I was serving a church in Columbus, Ohio, one of those Sunday Christmases appeared on the calendar, and the local paper did an article exploring the various practices of different churches on a Christmas Sunday. Catholics usually have well attended Christmas day services every year, so a Christmas Sunday isn’t much different. Protestants are another matter. I don’t think any church I’ve ever been associated with had Christmas day services unless Christmas fell on a Sunday.

In this newspaper article there was an interview with a megachurch pastor whose church planned not to have any services on Sunday that year. According to this pastor, Christmas was about family, and they didn’t want to hold services which might get in the way of family time and family traditions. The article also quoted a New York Times article where several megachurch pastors said pretty much the same thing.

It is true that many families gather at Christmas, that various traditions evolve around opening presents and enjoying a big, holiday meal. Often newly married couples have to make difficult decisions about whose family they will spend Christmas day with.

But were those megachurch pastors correct? Is Christmas about family? Or maybe a better question; what is Christmas about?

It’s not about only one thing, I suppose. It certainly is about shopping and presents. Many retailers are heavily dependent on the Christmas shopping season in order to turn a profit for the year. Of course that Christmas has little to do with the one we are here to talk about today. That Christmas isn’t even necessarily religious. People with no religious attachments at all still put up trees and celebrate Christmas.

In the days before I became a pastor, I once worked for a company that was owned by a Jewish family. They held their company Christmas party – that’s what they called it – at the Jewish community center complete with Christmas tree and Santa Claus.

But most of us here are Presbyterians, Protestant Christians whose tradition says that our ultimate guide to what really matters and what is really true comes from scripture. And so, while we know all about and celebrate a Christmas that includes trees and Santa Claus and presents, presumably the Bible is where we go to find out what Christmas is really about.

However we run into a bit of a problem here in that only one of the four gospels actually has a Christmas story, Luke. Matthew tells of an angel appearing to Joseph in a dream and convincing him to take the pregnant Mary as his wife but tells nothing of the birth itself.

Perhaps this paucity of Christmas information is what led people to take the story of the Magi and join it to Christmas. Now we can have a star over our creche and fancy presents delivered by eastern sages. However, the Magi story likely happens when Jesus is around two years old, certainly not at the manger, and I wonder if we don’t miss something of what Luke is trying to tell us when we combine the two stories.

If we can remove the star and the Magi and their presents from our mental image of Christmas, I wonder what we might see that we have missed. Luke has set his extended Christmas story in the context of two rulers, Herod and the Emperor Augustus. The latter was greeted with calls of “The emperor is lord!” Yet when Luke tells of the angel appearing to the shepherds, we hear that to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

Savior, anointed one (which is what Messiah means), and Lord; all these are titles for the emperor. Luke’s Christmas story makes an explicitly political claim. Here is one who usurps the loyalty owed the emperor. No longer is Caesar lord. Jesus is Lord! All political loyalties have been superseded by loyalty to Jesus, and that is as true in our day is it was then. Jesus alone is Lord, and so his commands to love neighbor and even enemies apply to our politics as well.

But even though Jesus is the one owed ultimate loyalty, nothing about his birth comes with the trappings of wealth or power. There is not even a private room for him to be born in. In all likelihood he is born in a private home, in a portion of the house where the animals were brought in at night. You could not get much further from a palace.

And when the angel tells the shepherds about this very unroyal like birth, the signs that are given are just as mundane, a manger and bands of cloth. (Older Bible translations spoke of swaddling clothes.) This was the standard practice in that day. They wrapped cloth around newborns to make them lie straight and not curled up. So in essence the divine signs given to the shepherds speak of poverty and ordinariness. This baby will look just like every other baby.

And then there is the choice of shepherds to visit. In our only Christmas story, shepherds are the only ones told and the only ones who come to see Jesus besides other members of the household where Jesus is born. Shepherds were the rough, uncouth rednecks of their day, the very last people one would expect to attend a royal birth.

Luke’s Christmas story insists that when God enters decisively into human history, the divine presence is not found in the halls of power or grand homes of the wealthy, nor is the birth attended by anyone special. God is found in the most ordinary of circumstances, and that presence is most accessible to the lowly. This is the Jesus Mary sung of prior to his birth. “(God) has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Perhaps you’ve seen the story of the Bethlehem church that set up a very untraditional nativity this year. The baby Jesus is lying in the midst of a pile of rubble. I’m not sure but what this West Bank church truly understands what Christmas is about. God comes into the midst of those who are lowly and forgotten. This Savior, this Lord is not to be found among the mighty and the powerful. This God is to be found in the midst of the pain and hurt and suffering of the world.

In just a few hours, many of us will gather here again. We will come for the children’s pageant, and we will come for the lessons and carols and candlelight. Brass will play and we will join our voices to those of the angelic host who sing to celebrate Jesus’ birth. We should join them. We must join them. If even the hosts of heaven could not help but sing, how can we?

Yet it can be easy to sing, go home to celebrate Christmas, including the one with trees and presents and Santa Claus, and then return to life as usual. It can be easy to celebrate and then be done with it all until next year, to catch our breath after the whirlwind of Christmas and enter another January like every January before.

But if we really want to do Christmas right, we need to follow the shepherds, too. We need to find Jesus in places like where the shepherds did, not in halls of power, not among the mighty or wealthy, but among the weak and lowly, in the midst of the everyday pain and hurt of the world.

And we need to let the weak and lowly, the hurting and forgotten, those amidst destruction and rubble, know that a Savior has been born for them. Yes, for us, but for them especially. And we cannot do Christmas right if it does not proclaim release to the captive and hope to the hopeless.

Christ is born! Glory to God in the highest heaven. God has come into our midst, and Christ is to be found at work in the pain of our world. Thanks be to God!