Every year we start hearing advertisements for Christmas three or four months in advance and finally the day has come. At the same time, the Christian community especially bewails the commercialization and materialism of Christmas. I have preached sermons about it.
But as I said, the day has come, and even the most spiritual among us enjoys giving and receiving gifts. That being said and all thoughts of possible hypocrisy aside, what do you want for Christmas?
I want the latest iPhone. Those iPhones are amazing! Do you know what they can do? Not only can you make calls on them, but also you can get all of your email on them, they have calculators, you can surf the web, dictate memos, take pictures, listen to your favorite music, and a host of other things that I haven’t even begun to explore.
And you can do all of these things just about anywhere in the world—at home, at work, in the mall, at school, at a restaurant; crazy people can even do it while driving. I hear you can even do it while the preacher is preaching.
In other words, wherever you are, you can really be somewhere else. It’s a kind of Buddhist experience.
It’s part of the social media. When you think about it, however, it’s about as antisocial as it gets. People can be at the same table, eating dinner, no one talking to anyone else, everyone looking at his or her iPhone! There’s a not-so-subtle message in that. It says, “I’d rather be anywhere else but here!”
What we celebrate tonight is the antithesis of the iPhone experience. The meaning of Christmas is that God, who is immortal, invisible, omnipotent, beyond our capacity to comprehend, the Creator of the universe, chose to redeem humanity by becoming intimately involved in humanity by becoming a human being himself. Through Jesus Christ, he is not detached from his creation, but intimately involved. Through the story of the birth of our Savior, God says to us all, “There is nowhere else I would rather be than with you.”
The story of the birth of the Savior of the world is full of details about how that involvement took place. It was during the time of a census, required by the occupying Roman government. Mary and Joseph had to leave their home in Nazareth to be registered in Joseph’s ancestral town, Bethlehem. The journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem had to have been arduous. Riding on a donkey for 70 miles must have been very uncomfortable, to say the least, for a woman in the last stages of her pregnancy, and that’s assuming they had a donkey. Bethlehem was exceedingly crowded, for the lineage of King David had to have been great, and by the time Joseph and Mary arrived in Bethlehem, the only inn in town was full to overflowing.
You know the story, enshrined in our crèche, yet the crèche romanticizes what had to have been indescribably difficult. Imagine the teeming crowds, the consequent smells and debris of overcrowding, the anxiety of an impending birth in God only knew where. One thing Mary and Joseph knew: the baby wouldn’t be born in a quiet, clean place. There wasn’t such a place to be found. They ended up staying in a stable, which was most likely a cave, and when the baby Jesus was born, his bed was a feeding trough.
On one of my visits to the Holy Land, I saw a typical manger, and it wasn’t made of wood. It was an oblong stone block, with a hole carved out in the middle of it. It was that kind of feeding trough our Lord was most likely placed in after his birth. And while his birth was heralded by angels, the announcement was to poor shepherds, people on the very bottom rung of society, watching their flocks by night. It was certainly an ignoble setting for the beginning of the earthly life of the One who would save the world.
Yet it was fitting that the Savior should be born in such a way. He is God with us, Emmanuel. He does not remain detached from the difficulties and darkness of our human condition, but wants to let his light shine in every part of our lives. There is no corner in our lives too dark, no sin too great, no challenge too difficult, in which he would choose not to be involved, if we let him in. “Where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.”
But the fact of the matter is that we often choose not to invite the Lord Jesus into segments of our lives. We choose to keep him at arm’s length, rather like looking at our iPhones while in his presence, whether that means not allowing him to influence our business decisions, or a particular relationship, or how we spend our time or money. There are no dark corners of our lives Jesus does not want to illumine, yet he always gives us the choice; we must issue the invitation. Christmas, the celebration of the incarnation, is the most tangible affirmation that can be made, that in the darkness of our human condition the light of Christ may shine.
May our Lord Jesus Christ, who desires to be involved intimately in your life and mine grant us the grace to invite him. May this Christmas be much more than the simple giving and receiving of gifts, but the receiving of the dear Lord Christ himself, for “where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.”
I really don’t want my iPhone now. I’ve kind of talked myself out of it. I guess I’ll just stick with the old model, which, admittedly, is only about two months’ old! I hadn’t really let anybody know that I wanted one anyway, so it probably is a good thing that I’ve talked myself out of it! I’m sure I’m going to get some really nice gifts, though, but the greatest gift is our Lord Jesus Christ. “To us a child is born. O come, let us adore him.”
Sermon preached by The Very Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer, Sarasota, Florida
Christmas 2014