Oh, Holy Night 12.22.2021

    My Christmas Eve sermon is complete. My Sermon for the Sunday after Christmas, December 26th? It is finished too. That means, barring a tragic holiday death or an unanticipated holiday wedding my preaching work for 2021 is very nearly complete. All that remains is the blog post you are reading and another to wrap up the year sometime next week. The next sermon I will write will be the first for the calendar year 2022. 

    I am more sentimental than you might imagine. When I think of Christmas I think of my mother and father, who are both gone. I think about driving across Southern Illinois from Salem to Fairfield to my grandparents’ house a family of 7 singing Christmas Carols in a big blue Buick station wagon. I remember going to church on Christmas Eve. I remember what it was like to be mastered by the mystery. 

    I also remember how I felt when as a young single minister, I had to wait until after Christmas Eve services to drive home to be with my family. That was a different kind of formative memory. Those kinds of circumstances tested the resolve of a young preacher. Tested the resolve of my mom as well! (In today’s world I would throw in a lol there). The next phase of the process was after marriage. Now the decision to be with my congregants for Christmas Eve not only impacted me but also set the parameters for how my wife and children would understand and come to appreciate Christmas. At various times we lived close to her hometown or mine, and we still got to see family after my pastoral obligations were complete. 

    I have participated in Christmas Eve services that were stunningly beautiful and I have participated in Christmas Eve services that were staggeringly bad.  Most of the time I was responsible. One just does a thorough debrief, catalogs mistakes, files away the hits, and puts one’s head down, always looking forward to next year, but first, next week. 

    There is nothing I like more than a warm study in the gloaming of a mid-December evening, listening to Bach or George Winston’s December while preparing a message which may be the first, last, and only sermon that someone hears this year. What a privilege to stand behind the sacred desk with such an opportunity for impact. 

    If you are not a preacher, I hope you understand the peril and promise for your preacher during the Christmas season. We are in an ever-escalating arms race with the Worship Industrial Complex. Too many believers and seekers are searching, not for a holy, silent, and intimate night but for shallow, whoopee cushion worship, that does not speak to their mind or challenge their heart, but that increases their amusement. The mystery of the incarnation is many things. Amusing is not one of them. If you think that Christmas Eve needs a bang-up production with live animals, trapeze artists, and professional actors you have missed the point, need to repent, and consider yourself scolded. If you join us for worship at Grayville First Christian Church the room will be lighted with candles, it will be silent as a stable, and our hearts will be submissive to the Word made flesh. 

    Let me say something to you, preacher. God shook hands with our history on Christmas. Jesus particularized all the promises of the Father and took upon himself the vulnerable flesh of an infant. Scripture tells us of His relationship with the Father before the singing-star concert of creation ever began. The Gospels also tell us the rustic story of His historical, physical, wearied, wandering, pilgrim parents. Once a year He bids us stand up and ask, Like Linus Van Pelt for the lights to be dimmed, so that we may remind historical, physical, wearied, wandering, pilgrims that the Word has spoken. The light shines. The night is silent. The Lord has come.