Christmas 1996 (#1)

What Christmas is about

Christmas is a wonderful time, but it’s also a very complicated time. It’s complicated because, depending on who you are, and even where you are; the same person in different situations looks at this day very differently. I mean, if you owned a Wal-Mart store in town, you would look at Christmas as a time when you would make more money in one month than you did in all the rest of the year, if you were a plant grower and sold poinsettias, those lovely red tropical flowers, then you’d be all excited because then once a year you’d get to sell lots of those things, and if you’re six or seven, or ten or twelve, Christmas would be special because there’d be the prospect of all kinds of extra food, special food, presents, all sorts of things... And all those are all right... But the reason we’re here in this room tonight is to look at a different way of understanding this time.

Maybe a little history of this feast would be helpful. We don’t know when Jesus was born; we don’t know the day or the month, or even the year, for sure, that Jesus was born in. But we know that the people who thought that Jesus was a special person were living in a time when all the other people were having a big party on December twenty-fifth. And it was a pretty wild party too: they got drunk, and threw up because they ate too much, and did all kinds of other weird stuff which they thought was having a good time... But the Christians thought "naw, we can’t do all that stuff." So they just sat at home, and then some bright soul thought that the reason the Romans are having this big festival on that day is that, back in those days just like ours, the days are getting shorter and shorter: December twenty-second is the shortest day of the whole year, there is less light, if it shines at all--they obviously didn’t live in Canada... if the sun shines at all, it shines for the shortest time on December twenty-second. So the people in those days thought the world was going to just get darker and darker, and the days were going to get shorter and shorter. But then right after that, of course, the days started getting longer. December twenty-third is a few seconds longer than December twenty-second, December twenty-fourth is the same..., so by December twenty-fifth it was pretty clear that the sun was not just going to be blotted out. And that’s why the Romans had this big party: "ahh, good, the world’s not going to end, the wine crop is going to come through." So the Christians said: "well, we believe that Jesus is the light too. so we’ll just take that festival and make it ours and call it Christmas." So what we’re thinking about in this room tonight is trying to figure out what’s so special about this, beside all the other things like getting lots of toys, or making lots of money.

We believe that on this day we’re to remember that god is saying something extraordinarily special and important to the human race. even you little kids in this room watch TV and maybe you walked past the TV sets when the news was on showing all these little kids who don’t have any food, or don’t have any clothes, or walk around in the snow without any shoes on, or their parents got lost and they don’t know where to go... because if you lose your mom and dad, maybe it’s happened to you in a department store or in a park--it’s really scary. and so what we believe God is saying to us is that, even though all those little kids seem to be totally lost and forgotten, they are not forgotten. God has not forgotten them. And that is, granted if you’re a little kid, that may not be the most exciting news in the world, but believe me, the longer you live, the more important that fact is going to be. The longer you live you’re going to find out that all kinds of people are forgotten on this planet. In fact the chances are excellent that everybody in this room is going to have precisely that feeling: "nobody cares about me, I am forgotten, I am lost, I am out in the cold, I have no place to go..." And I’m sixty-one and I’ve seen more Christmases than most of you people. I have not outgrown that kind of experience; that the world is, like that TV show says: "the third rock from the sun," and that’s all there is...

So we believe that, in this man Jesus, God was trying to get through our thick heads that god does not forget anybody, and we don’t even have to think about those little kids in Zaire, or Tanzania, or Burundi, or the Palestinian kids in the West Bank, or those little kids in Northern Ireland..., or the thousands of little kids who die every day on this planet because they don’t have anything to eat... But, we don’t just have to think about them, we have to think about all the kids and everybody’s feelings when they begin to think: "I’m too ugly, I’m too fat, I’m too tall, I’m too short, I’m they wrong colour, I’m too dumb, I’m too clumsy..." Everybody. I mean even us so-called grown-ups are scared of stuff like that. I don’t think anybody, nobody I know, has ever outgrown that kind of fear that somehow I’m on the outside..., somehow I’m lost. But Christmas is saying that no, God really wants us to be together with each other... And that’s what Christmas is about from the church business. I mean, there’s Awl-Mart, and there’s boxes of chocolate, and cookies, and, I don’t know what the going toy is, "Squeeze me Elmo," whatever that strange thing is.... There is all that stuff. But at the bottom of that stuff, we believe, and your folks believe, is something much more important, much more real, and much bigger; and that is this business of what we believe God is trying to say with Jesus and that is that everybody counts... Everybody counts because we can’t have a planet where somebody is left out... Nobody is to be left out. That’s why we can talk about "Joy to the World," and "What Child is This": it’s special kids that can tell us that stuff. So I hope that Christmas does not die on December twenty-sixth but that you can remember as the toys get broken and the candy gets eaten that there is still something bigger and better underneath all this stuff.

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