Joyous Christmas Eve

Do you give someone a gift that's practical, or impractical? On this Christmas Eve, I hope you might receive both.

As for the practical:

Put yourself in the position of Joseph on the night Jesus was born. Every once in a while we hear about someone giving birth in a shopping mall, or a taxicab. This was the first-century equivalent of a taxicab delivery.

After the long journey, the labor pains, the anxiety of finding a delivery room and settling instead for a back room, we might imagine Mary – after giving birth – to be exhausted and resting. Maybe even gone to sleep.

Joseph is sitting there – dazed and confused, as are most new fathers – too tired to make sense of what has just happened. Mary has been telling him all sorts of unbelievable things about this baby for months now. Including that he will be a king.

Joseph, a laborer, a commoner, not of noble or royal blood, asks himself, “How do you raise a king?”

Well, I’ll raise him to be a carpenter, he says. That’s what I know how to do. He’ll be a hard worker, he’ll learn a trade, he’ll get calluses on his hands. By his hard work, the boy will grow up to serve his neighbor.

That’s the first gift, the practical one. Jesus, born this night, won’t grow up to be a professionally religious person, a bishop, or a minister with an advanced degree. He won’t look for people to fill the church or to be churchy people. He’ll look for carpenters, and farmers, and teachers, and accountants, and nurses …

Better yet, he’ll look for people whose identity isn’t defined by their job or their career, but for those who are willing to follow his call to be compassionate, kind, gentle, patient – people who will forgive each other and value the really valuable things in life.

That’s the most practical gift of all because that means the one born this night came for you, whoever you are, whatever you do (or whatever you’ve done). He won’t necessarily ask you to change your occupation or your avocation in order to follow him. He might ask you to change your heart, but you don’t have to stop being you. You don’t have to fit a cookie-cutter mold. You’re human. Jesus was human.

It’s not about how much you know that matters. It’s about how much you trust – how much you trust this Jesus.

As for the second gift, the impractical one, the one you can't hold or put your arms around …

Why is this night different from all others? The Scriptures tell us that it was a star that cast a different light in the sky. You know what we would do today with that star? We'd use our scientific minds to figure it out. There's a theory the Star of Bethlehem was actually Jupiter appearing in the constellation of Aries about the time of a lunar eclipse.

This isn’t a knock against science. I loved my college astronomy course. But there’s a time for facts, and there’s a time when facts can’t explain mystery. That's the second gift I hope you receive tonight: the sense of mystery.

Tonight isn’t just December 24, 2009. It is a night that is connected to all the Christmas Eves we’ve ever known. Christ’s birth was the night the world changed.

Our Christmas memories go back to our childhood, maybe our parents or grandparents. But we serve a Mystery that neither you nor your father’s father or mother’s mother began. The laughter and the tears that accompany this night are not born of our own traditions, as precious and wonderful as they may be. They are reflections of the Mystery of God, written across the stars in a sky of luminous brilliance. A million million times we can stare into that sky, and it will still remain a mystery.

Christmas Eve is the night we are invited to stand together, elbow to elbow, parka to parka, shivering knees to shivering knees, and gaze into that infinite sky, beyond all the things we know and understand, to contemplate what we don't know or understand. And God says it is good. It is mystery, and it is holy.

Merry Christmas!

Thanks to Jerry Camery-Hoggatt and William C. Martin

Original posts at http://wrigleypreacher.blogspot.com