Christmas Is Too Wondrous To Be This Busy

Moving sidewalks. Powered walkways. Whatever you want to call them, they’re long, thin conveyer belts that stretch through long hallways in airport terminals.

And wherever you see these moving sidewalks, it’s always the same. There are three different kinds of travelers. There are those travelers who turn their nose up at the moving sidewalks and say, “when I was a kid, I used to walk through six inches of snow uphill, both ways, every time I went through the airport. If I did it then, I can do it now.” Maybe they’re trying to get their steps in for the day.

Regardless, my focus is not so much on those folks who walk on the regular floor. My focus is on the two types of travelers who use the moving walkways.

Some of the people who use the moving walkways will walk on the moving walkway. These folks are on a mission. They’re late for their flight, or they want to make sure they get their 10,000 steps for the day. Those are the folks who walk.

Then there are the ones who ride. Some of these walkways are really long. You can put your bag down, rest your aching shoulders, and enjoy the feeling of not lugging three suitcases along the floor. (Just make sure you don’t get too used to it, because when the moving walkway transitions to a carpet floor, you’re in trouble if you’re not prepared.)

As we travel into the Christmas season, which kind of traveler are you? Are you on a mission, determined to cross everything off your list and then some? You are racing through the holidays. You’re tired, you’re probably irritable, and when you get up in the morning on Dec. 26, you’re asking, “What happened to it? Was that it? I missed it.”

Or are you riding — and enjoying it?

This is not just a sermon about slowing down. This is a sermon about why we must slow down and be present through Christmas — not so much for personal reasons, but for spiritual reasons.

What if the Christmas season is about our discipleship, our growing in our faith? If it is, then to race through it, focused only on getting things done, we’ve missed the whole point — and missed on what God wants to do in our hearts and our lives over the next 4-5 weeks.

We are travelers embracing on a journey through the Christmas season. There are many paths to distract us on that journey. One path you might take is commercialization.

1. Commercialism

One of those distracting side roads is commercialization.

One of my favorite scenes from Charlie Brown Christmas is where the kids are outside catching snowflakes on their tongues. I think it’s Lucy who started complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. She says “it’s all run by some big eastern syndicate”, you know.

Christmas is highly commercialized. Part of preaching is trying to persuade your audience. But that’s not necessary here. I don’t need to prove that to you. I don’t need to spend time trying to convince you that Christmas is so commercialized, the meaning of Christmas has been so distorted, the reason for celebrating has become so obscured that if someone were to try to get out of all that mess and learn the real reason for Christmas, they wouldn’t know where to look.

A natural place to look would be the church. Do you agree? If one were to conclude that Christmas is ultimately about Jesus, and to try to come to a church during the Christmas season to learn more about Him, what would they find?

In many churches, they would find preachers not preaching expository messages from the text of Scripture; they would instead hear messages that enhance the commercialization of Christmas. Shallow sermons on self-help, 15 minute messages on how to achieve success at work, or how to get more of what you want out of your marriage. The preacher may be standing behind the pulpit, but his sermons are actually serving the commercialization of Christmas by encouraging us to come to be consumers even while we sit in the pews of our church.

The problem with commercialism is that it’s so loud and chaotic that it is hard to hear the still, small voice of God. Commercialism bombards us with constant images, constant sound bites, relentless promotion. With constant advertising engineered by psychology experts and designed to play to our emotions and our preferences and even our fears and our prejudices.

Never mind that nothing we’ve ever purchased has ever given us lasting happiness; “this, at last, is what I’ve been looking for, this will bring me joy” — not realizing that what we think is joy is really just a burst of dopamine, and that only because we’ve been trained — and we’ve trained ourselves — to experience happiness at the thought of yet another package arriving at our back door.

Commercialization. Stuff. There’s nothing wrong with stuff. Businesses have to make money. We need what they produce. But when stuff becomes everything, it has become a distraction from the true meaning of Christmas.

How do we as Christians respond to a commercialized Christmas? We keep speaking the truth, and doing it in love, and we keep living lives that bear witness to the truth.

There’s another path. Romanticization. Love.

2. Romanticism

So you have some people thinking Christmas is all about stuff. You’ve got other people thinking it’s all about romantic love.

Widows grieving

When I was a teenager, I had very different priorities than I have now. When I was in college in high school, I got dumped by a girl right before Christmas. I was so upset that I didn’t want anything to do with Christmas. “What’s Christmas without her?”

And it was so silly because looking back, we had only been together for 18 months. By contrast, I’ve been married to Shannon for almost 18 years! But there’s another reason why it was so silly. It was silly because if I truly understood, I should have been able to celebrate Christmas no matter what my relationship status was. Isn’t that the whole point of the Christmas message?

So let me tell you a secret: my wife likes Hallmark movies. Any of you guys in the same boat?

Women, how many of you like Hallmark movies?

The story is usually the same. A single, independent, strong career-minded woman from the big city through some sort of combination of circumstances has to travel to the country, where she meets a man who is everything she is not — he’s family oriented, he’s kind, he’s humble — he’s also usually the hotel manager and the mayor and the general store operator. Oh, by the way, he’s usually a prince.

And the girl from the city, really against her will, finds herself attracted to this man, and they start dating. Then something silly happens, and they breakup. But then they get back together, because, you know. they can’t live without each other even though they’ve only known each other for a like a week. And then, of course, it turns out the guy is royalty, like a prince.

Now obviously, I just gave myself away! I actually have found myself enjoying them once I sit down with her to watch them. Sometimes. There’s a reason why people like them. They are wholesome. You can watch them and maintain your integrity. Your kids can watch them with you. So I am not at all trying to put down Hallmark movies.

But, would you agree, in honesty, that most Hallmark movies are about romance? And most romantic Hallmark movie presents romantic love as the thing Christmas is all about — the thing that, without it, there wouldn’t be Christmas?

Advertisements do the same thing. There are all these advertisements at Christmas showing you pictures of people enjoying their Christmas presents with their spouses or partners or whatever. The message is: Christmas is about stuff and love — presents and romance.

God did not come down from heaven to earth to give us every material blessing we want , but to give us Himself!

Christ left His heavenly throne to come and be born as a helpless baby in a dingy feeding trough so that we would be freed from suffering and sadness. He came so that He could grow up as a real human being, to suffer on our behalf on the cross and then come to live within us and walk with us through our own suffering.

The message of Christmas is: my life may be falling apart, but it’s okay, because I belong to Jesus. I am His and He is mine. And whatever else happens to me here, I can never lose Him, because by the Holy Spirit I am welded to Christ for ever.

Romance — there’s nothing wrong with it, necessarily. There’s definitely nothing wrong with genuine, human, romantic love. But when it becomes everything to us, and when Christmas becomes all about that, it has become an idol to be destroyed rather than a blessing to be sought.

How do we as Christians respond to a romanticized Christmas? We keep speaking the truth, and doing it in love, and we keep living lives that bear witness to the truth.

How about this one? Secularization.

3. Secularism

We may have been a Christian nation at one point in history, but we are definitely not a Christian nation at this point in history. We live in what is called a pluralistic society. Pluralism says: “there is some truth in all religions, and no one religion has all the truth.” “So”, says pluralism, “all religion must be removed from the public square.” This started about a half a century ago and has continued until now.

And from that we get a secular society, which is a society where any reference to God has been scrubbed away.

So, Merry Christmas became Happy Holidays. Christmas trees became holiday trees. Suddenly even putting a nativity scene on public property became controversial, seen as an insult to anyone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas.

And so we have a society that wants to celebrate all the blessings of Christmas, like joy or peace or love, without celebrating the Author of those blessings. There is no true joy or peace or love at Christmas without the

Apart from Christ, how can we talk about peace with a straight face in a time when Europe and the Middle East are overwhelmed with two wars? Wars that show no signs of ending any time soon, by the way.

How can we talk about joy while we live in a nation where teenagers and young adults are experiencing record high levels of depression?

How can we talk about love when we live surrounded by lost men and women and children in our own neighborhoods, and we who have the message of reconciliation with God through Christ are silent, and by our silence we communicate that we hate them, not that we love them.

So we get a Christmas with empty promises of peace and love, with shallow and vague notions of joy.

How do we as Christians respond to a secularlized Christmas? We keep speaking the truth, and doing it in love, and we keep living lives that bear witness to the truth.

All of these things — commercialism, romanticism, secularism, make the same claim: this is what Christmas is all about. This — whether stuff or romance or is the only thing Christmas is about. And in this way these three things can be seen to be idols. They are false gods. And the thing about false gods — the thing about idols — they’re

There is a better way. There is a better way to travel through the Christmas holidays, being people who are along for the ride rather than trying to rush to the end as fast as possible.

Would you take your Bible for about six minutes and follow along with me, from Matt 1:18-23.

Look with me at verse 18: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quickly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

So, Joseph and Mary are betrothed. This is kind of like our engagement. Except for one thing — a betrothal could only be ended by a legal divorce.

But Mary is pregnant. Joseph knows he’s not the father. Any reasonable man would conclude she has been unfaithful. And anyone from the outside would think that either Mary has been unfaithful, or that she and Joseph have already consummated their marriage. Either way, it looks like a scandal.

Joseph, being a good man, really thinks that the best thing to do is end it. But the angel of the Lord shows up in a dream, and he has a message for Joseph. That message is basically this: “Joseph, this is not what it looks like.”

He explains: Mary is pregnant, but she didn’t get pregnant in the usual way. The child in her womb is from God. There is no hint here of a sexual relationship between Mary and God. This is the creative power of God reaching directly into Mary. This is the Holy Spirit bypassing the normal channel of becoming pregnant, and supernaturally conceiving the human baby in her womb.

There’s only one thing this can mean: this baby will be utterly, absolutely, completely unique.

He will be fully human, and also fully God. This little boy will be humanity attached to divinity. In this little boy who will be named Jesus, the heavenly and the earthly meet. This little baby boy will be the place where sinful humanity meet with a merciful God who longs to forgive. “God and sinners, reconciled.”

And it the Holy Spirit who does this. Every passage that deals with the virgin birth of Jesus Christ emphasizes the role of the Holy Spirit. In our pictures and nativity scenes, we see the barn, we see the manger with the infant Jesus sleeping, we see the animals, we see Joseph and Mary. We don’t see the Holy Spirit, and so most of us probably don’t think about the Holy Spirit in when we think of the Christmas story.

And let me preface what I’m about to say. Let me plead with you for a minute. I’m about to talk some theology to you.

Some of you are going to hear me start talking and you’re going to think I’m giving you something you don’t need. Something you can’t understand. I am asking you this morning, as your pastor, to resist that with everything you’ve got.

Church, do you know what theology is? It’s the study of God — Your Creator, Your Father, Your Sustainer, Your Savior, Your Friend.

Church, I’m going to go a step further and plead with you this morning to repent of thinking that theology is unhelpful. Yes, I said repent. Trust that no knowledge you gain about God is going to be a waste of your time.

Genesis 1:1–2 ESV

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

If we turn to the very first page of the Bible and look at the first two verses of the book of Genesis, we read this: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.” Do you know what comes next in v. 2: “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

So, I’m thinking about this this past week as I was preparing: the Holy Spirit of God was present and active at the first creation. Okay. We know sin spoiled that first creation. We also know that the coming of Jesus that first Christmas was the beginning of the new creation.

So let me share with you what I think is going on here: At the first creation, the Holy Spirit is there. Now, at the new creation, the Holy Spirit is there.

The Holy Spirit took the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God — the Holy Spirit took Him and attached Him, so to speak, to the human child in Mary’s womb. And the new creation was born. [See O’Donnell, PTW, p42].

This is some deep theology. You need to know it. Why? Jesus will be the beginning of a new creation: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” This child died for your sins. And now He is risen and reigning in heaven as King.

Call for response

Do you need to be made new? Come to this child in the manger. In faith, turn to Him. Receive His grace. Let your sins be washed away.

If you’re a believer already, if you’ve already experienced Jesus’ once-for-all salvation, but you’ve walked away, you’ve gotten distracted by secularism and commercialism and romanticism, it’s as simple as coming back. The same grace that met you when you got saved is there to welcome you back home after you’ve strayed.

What are some things you can do this Christmas season to be a traveler who enjoys the journey?

How to enjoy the journey?

Come to church

Come to one thing besides Sunday morning

Have family devotions (Advent calendar)

Have personal devotions and prayer time

These things return our focus to Christ.

These things take time, which is exactly what most of us don’t think we have. Right? “I don’t have time.”

Have you ever noticed that that phrase is almost rarely ever true? “I don’t have time”. You always have time!

When I say, “I don’t have time to go to Bible study or read my Bible because I need to put up Christmas decorations,” I’m not really being entirely truthful, am I?

What I should say is this: “I do have time. I’m not going read my Bible or go to church, not because I don’t have time, but because I I am choosing to instead use that time to put up Christmas lights outside my house.” We don’t say it that way because it sounds really bad. But it’s a more truthful statement, is it not?

We all have time. Every single person in the room this morning has time - every minute until the minute of your death is time that you have to spend. And you will spend it in one way or another.

As we travel into the Christmas season, which kind of traveler are you? Are you on a mission, determined to cross everything off your list and then some?

Christmas is about our discipleship. About our growing in our relationship with God. Let’s not race through it, focused only on getting things done, and in the process, miss what it was all about.

Hebrews 13:20–21 ESV

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

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