Christmas Eve
In the name of the God of Hope,
and despair, and everything in between.
Amen.
Sometime over the next couple of
days, amidst all the busyness of the holiday, I invite you to give yourself a
little gift. The gift of joy. Go onto Google, and search “Hallmark
Christmas Movie Meme”. If that doesn’t
put you in the joy of the season, I’m not sure anything will.
Basically, the premise of what
you’ll find in that search is that the premises of all those movies are always
the same. The most popular one shares a
message like this: it says, “The plot of every Hallmark Christmas movie is the
same. It’s about a career woman from the
big city who is too busy for love, but she has to go back home to her small
town, where a handsome local bachelor teaches her about the true spirit of
Christmas. It starts snowing, and they
kiss. There is also a dog. And the mysterious old man in town is
actually Santa.”
I tease my mother mercilessly,
because she records these movies every time they come on, and she watches them
all year long – as if Hallmark weren’t already playing them basically all year
long. But even so, there’s a certain
charm that comes from these silly little made-for-TV movies. They may not offer much in the way of
substance or social commentary, but they do tug at heart strings. They make us feel the “Christmas feelings”.
The problem is, the “Christmas
feelings” are pretty far removed from the reality of the Christmas story. The actual Christmas story, as we read part
of it tonight, is a story of scandal and intrigue. It’s a story of the fear of betrayal, and
learning to trust – both in God and in people.
It’s not just about sentimentality, and feeling warm, and surrounding
yourself with gifts and comfort foods and family. The real Christmas story is a story of uncertainty
and vulnerability.
In the real Christmas story, we
hear of a traveling young family – straining under the burdensome requirements
of bureaucracy and an oppressive, occupying foreign government. In the midst of meeting their obligations,
the little family grows by one. The
young woman gives birth. The image we typically
see is of this beatific mother kneeling over her cooing child, but I’m sure
every mother here would attest that the whole night didn’t look like that. Just before the picture we hold so dear,
there was the real picture – of flesh and pain.
But once the child was born,
that’s when the real craziness began.
Angels began singing to shepherds in their fields. And the shepherds left those fields and drove
their flocks into town to see the amazing thing that had been told to them –
that the Messiah, the Savior from God who had been foretold for all time, was
finally there.
The story is almost too crazy –
even for a Hallmark movie. And it
doesn’t leave us feeling squishy.
But the problem with Hallmark
Christmas movies, and other stories of the season like that is that they leave us
expecting that that’s how we’re supposed to feel. And while the movies can sometimes make us
feel that way, it doesn’t mean that we’ve somehow failed if real life doesn’t
make us feel that way.
The point of Christmas isn’t the
“squishy feels”. The point of Christmas
is finding Christ. And the crazy,
amazing reality of God is that we tend to find that holiness that’s prepared
for us in our lives when least expect it.
Christ came to earth in a package
no one expected. He came as a
defenseless child, in a time and place of political instability, in an
inconsequential town, to parents embroiled in scandal, just trying to make it
work – when all the odds seemed stacked against them.
If you hear nothing else this
Christmas, hear this: God doesn’t need a perfect package to change the
world. God doesn’t need the best of
circumstances. God doesn’t need the most
important, or influential, or powerful, or wealthy people. God doesn’t need everything to “go right” or
even feel good.
God is straining to come into the
world (and into our lives and our attentions) like a mother pushing all of her
hope into the world through her newborn child.
So even if you’re not “feeling
it” this year (and even if you are) – that’s not the point. The point is, God can work with any old mess
– even us. Even Mary, and Joseph, and
some dirty, possibly delusional shepherds, and yes, even us. Even we
aren’t too messed up for God to bring hope into the world. Because that’s how it’s always done. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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