Perfectly Packaged Christmas

Pastor Burcham’s Sermon

 Christmas Eve, December 24, 2007

What’s the perfect Christmas scene to you? This is mine. As I think back on my childhood and I think what would be the perfectly packaged Christmas, I can’t think of anything better than a roaring fire, a comfortable chair, Christmas tree with presents and old Bing belting it out about a white Christmas. That makes for the perfectly packaged Christmas. It’s all the elements working together.

In one way or another, haven’t you all been working towards that same thing? Maybe you’re not thinking it would be an absolutely perfect Christmas this year but you want it to be special. You want it to be unique. You want it to be just right. You have lots of help out there. I went the library. There are just shelves full of how you can have the perfect holiday celebration. For fun, I went to Google and I typed in “the perfect Christmas.” Thousands upon thousands of articles, how to make the perfect Christmas pie, how to make the perfect Christmas ham, how to decorate the home the perfect way. I even found one article, you won’t believe this, the perfect Christmas tree. No, no, no, not how to decorate it and not an artificial Christmas tree but the perfect real Christmas tree. It seems that the tree growers of America have decided that artificial trees are just becoming too real and so they have genetically engineered a real Christmas tree that more resembles the fake Christmas tree. That’s right. It won’t have needles that fall off and it will be extremely green and it will have a perfect shape to it. So all of that science, all of that engineering with just one purpose in mind, so you could have the perfect Christmas.

Even though it’s all the same package, it’s Bing and all the rest, if we just sort of quiet it down and maybe if we even just turn Bing off, what’s the one element for you, though? I know it’s the perfect package but what’s the one element that you say to yourself, “It just wouldn’t be Christmas without this.” For each one of us, it’s probably something different. For some of you, it’s not Christmas unless you really nailed it with the gifts. You know what I’m saying? You just got the perfect Christmas gift for everyone on your list. You’re the person who was there at 12:01 at Jordan Creek, weren’t you? You were in line at 3:00 a.m. at Best Buy. You have scoured a tri-state area and hit all of the malls. You’ve worn out your mouse searching the Internet. Why? Because you wanted to find the perfect Christmas gift for everyone on your list.

Maybe it’s not the gifts. Maybe for you, it’s the decorations. Because, for you, that’s what really makes it special is you make sure you’ve decked the halls the way they should be and you’ve decorated everything just the way you want it to be. Right now, you should probably be in traction, not sitting in a pew, because you’ve climbed to new heights hanging lights. You’ve put new things upon your house. As far as you’re concerned, the Griswold’s are amateurs. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without all of the decorations.

It’s probably family, though. Family seems to be important with everybody and that’s to make sure we’re surrounded if not by family but by friends and we all gather together and usually then we have to have the meal. And if you have the meal, then it wouldn’t be Christmas unless you what? Maybe it’s the ham you cook or the turkey or the stuffing or whatever it is that’s your specialty. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without that.

Or what special family tradition do you have? It just wouldn’t be the same. For us, Christmas Day usually about 7:00 at night, we all load up in the van and we go down to Holly Jolly Holiday Lights. It wouldn’t be Christmas unless we did that, steam up all the windows. You can’t see the display so you have to roll the windows down. It just wouldn’t be the same if that didn’t happen.

But what is it for you? What is it that you say it just wouldn’t be Christmas if that wasn’t there? While you’re thinking about that, you might consider just how fragile that could be. What I mean by that is what happens if that one key element isn’t there anymore? What happens if things don’t go quite the way that you want them to go? What do you do when you find out, when the grandkids ask for a Wii, they weren’t talking about the expression on their face when they opened up the wool sweater. What happens if the ham burns or the corn souffle just isn’t quite what you wanted it to be? What do you do when the family comes around and everyone is there having a good time, all of a sudden, Uncle Ned shows up and he’s sauced to the gills and your favorite aunt and uncle, you can tell, they’ve been fighting all the way over to the house. Then what do you do? What if this Christmas doesn’t live up to your expectations? What if he doesn’t pop the question and you don’t face the new year with a ring on your hand? What if you’re missing somebody this Christmas season, then what?

My point is when we build ourselves over this facade and we hear the gentle music in the background and we think that’s the picture perfect Christmas, what happens if it all stopped? What happens if there was no music, there was no Christmas tree, there was nothing special? That one thing you wanted wasn’t there. Do you see what I’m saying? We set ourselves up for a disappointment. We set ourselves up to say, “You know what, it’s just not Christmas this year.” Or worse yet, we say, “Christmas has been ruined.”

Maybe the problem is we have the wrong focus, we need to bridge the gap between what we see as the picture perfect Christmas and the first Christmas. Let’s ask the question again. What is the perfectly packaged Christmas but, this time, let’s go back to the first Christmas. I don’t know about you but I can’t think of anything that was perfect about the first Christmas. In fact, I can’t think of anything else that could have gone wrong for them. Remember it with me. Okay, Mary finds out that she’s going to be pregnant with the Messiah so she’s elated at first, right? She gets to give birth to the Son of God but that has to fade away pretty quickly because in her society, an unwed girl who turns up pregnant, this isn’t pretty but you know what they do? In her day, they took them to the middle of the town square and they stoned them to death. That’s what she had in store of her. Oh, she had Joseph, of course. But Joseph, as soon as he finds out she’s pregnant and he knows it’s not his, well he does the natural thing. He’s not going to have anything to do with her. He’s going to try to handle it quietly so she doesn’t get stoned to death in the town square but she’s never going to see him again. Now Joseph comes around. An angel appears to him and says, “Joe, it’s okay. Really, she’s telling the truth. The baby that’s within her, that comes from the Holy Spirit.”

But now what happens? So Joseph takes her as his wife. They live in a small town. Can you imagine what that’s like? All of a sudden, a quick hurry-up wedding and then all of a sudden she starts showing. She is 3, 4, 5, 6 months’ pregnant. And then things really go south because Rome gets it into their head that they want to have a census which means everybody has to go back to their home town. Well, that means Joseph and Mary, they have to go down to Bethlehem so way up north in Nazareth, they have to travel all the way down south of Jerusalem to Bethlehem, not an easy journey to begin with but 9 months’ pregnant? Come on, Moms, would you want to travel on a donkey for that many hundreds of miles at 9 months’ pregnant? And then it goes from bad to worse because they arrive in Bethlehem and what happens? No room. Every hotel is booked up. Nobody has an extra bed. Go in the stable out back. That’s the only place they have to offer. Not the nice stable we always build, the nice wooden structure with fresh hay and everything looks kind of dainty and nice. No, no, no. We’re talking about a cave, something that was cut out of the side of a mountain, dusty, damp, smelly, dirty hay. The only place to lay the newborn when it arrives is going to be a feeding trough, a manger.

That’s hardly what I’d call the perfect Christmas. In fact, I don’t know about you, I can’t think about anything else that could have gone wrong. And yet, what does scripture say to us? After the shepherds have left, Luke says, “Yet Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” Treasured up all of these things? You mean all the disasters that happened, one right after another and Mary says these are my cherished memories that I will take with me to my grave. This is the very special day of my life. I’m going to treasure these memories? Yes. You see, once Jesus comes on the scene, it becomes the most perfect night. Once Jesus enters into the world, it becomes the perfect Christmas. If you were to ask Mary and Joseph, they would tell you that night was the most perfect Christmas ever. Long forgotten was the journey from Nazareth. A faint memory of the labor pains, the surroundings, it just doesn’t matter. Because the one key element is the babe who is lying in the manger. If the babe is lying in the manger, you have your perfect Christmas.

Maybe what we need to do is to refocus a little bit, change our focus from all of the peripheral and see the babe in the manger. Because this baby who’s lying in the manger is not only Mary’s son but He’s God’s Son. It’s God’s demonstration of His great love for us. It’s God, the Creator, saying He’s going to become one with His creation and He would remain one with His creation for all of eternity. It means that all of God’s promises have come true in this baby who’s lying in the manger. This is where God bridges the gap between heaven and earth as He comes down to live among us. It’s all there in the babe in the manger. You see, the perfect Christmas is the Christmas that we celebrate the right thing. It’s that we have our focus in the right area and our focus has to be on the baby because the baby came with a purpose. The angels said, “Be it good news for everyone. Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born.” A Savior. You see, the baby would grow up to be a man. The teachings of this man, Jesus, would forever change history but the death of this God-man, Jesus, would forever change your eternity.

You see, the baby in the manger came as your Savior. Tonight on Christmas Eve, we can’t really escape the fact of the mistakes we’ve made in life and our misdeeds, can we? In fact, sometimes on the holidays, they’re amplified. The broken relationships in our lives, the broken promises we’ve made, the things we regret, the words we wish we hadn’t have spoken, all those things can come crashing down upon us and we can feel the guilt. We can feel the remorse and the regret but the baby came to take all of that away. That’s the point of Christmas. Jesus came as the infant lying there in the manger to take away your guilt, to take away your sin because the babe would become the man on the cross. And through His death, He would do what you could not do. He would make the payment for all of your sins and misdeeds. He would remove the guilt and the shame from your life. He came to bring joy and peace and healing to your lives.

If you want the perfect Christmas, you have to focus on the babe in the manger. If you want the perfectly packaged Christmas, you have to bridge the gap because the babe in the manger must take center stage. Because all of our celebrations and all of our customs and all of our decorating, they only find meaning in the babe in the manger. And the great news is all of a sudden, Christmas doesn’t become so fragile anymore. You see, it can’t be lost because God’s love never changes. God’s promise to us will always be there. The babe in the manger is unchanging and His love for us is unchanging. That means if the ham burns and the corn souffle is ruined, if you have the babe in the manger, you still have a perfect Christmas.

If the perfect Christmas present is a perfect dud, if the family doesn’t show up, if the kids are grouchy tomorrow morning because they’ve stayed up too late, if you’re short with your spouse because you stayed up until midnight trying to put together a toy and it was missing a piece anyway, you have the babe in the manger. You still have a perfect Christmas.

If you’re alone tonight or you feel alone tonight, if this is the first Christmas you face with a loved one who has now gone to heaven, you’re not alone if you have the babe who’s in the manger. The babe in the manger says you’re loved one is in heaven with Him right now. The baby in the manger says it’s still a perfect Christmas.

God came into our world to bring healing and to bring joy and to bring peace and comfort to all of us. My friends, if you want the perfectly packaged Christmas, the one thing it wouldn’t be Christmas without is the baby in the manger. Amen.