A boy wanted something badly one Christmas, so he sat down to write God a letter. If you give me this one thing, I promise I will be good for a whole year. He read it back, thought better of it, and threw it away. Second sheet: six months. He looked at that one for a while too. Also unrealistic.
Then he glanced up and saw the nativity set on the table. He walked over, picked up Mary, wrapped her gently, opened his sock drawer, put her at the very back and shut it. Then he went back to his paper and wrote: Dear God, if you ever want to see your mother again...
That boy, we were told on Christmas Eve, grew up to be Pastor Kent.
It is funnier than it is holy, and it is also uncomfortably close to how Christmas can feel. A negotiation. Something to get through. The traffic on the way here, the packed malls, the empty shelves, the commercials, the music on every station — some of it about Christ, most of it not. Somebody walked into Home Depot that week and counted the Christmas displays. Not one nativity.
And the feelings are not uniform. Some of us were headed somewhere loud and warm and full of family. Some of us were missing a person who used to be at that table. Some of us were going home to an empty house. All of that was standing in the same yard that night.
Who the angels told
And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
The night shift. One of them stayed up so the others could sleep. Necessary work, genuinely useful work, and nobody knew their names — a little like the person who bags your groceries, or the one who takes out the trash at your office. Do you know that person's name?
Shepherds were not permitted to testify in court; their word was not considered reliable. Maybe because they were uneducated. Maybe because they were good storytellers and nobody could tell where the story stopped and the truth started. They likely did not even own the sheep they were guarding. They were making an honest living, out there in the dark, appreciated most when they stayed out there.
Although — look at the lineage. Abraham was a shepherd. Jacob was a shepherd. Moses was a shepherd. David, the most famous king Israel ever had, was a shepherd.
And when heaven finally broke open with the announcement the whole world had been waiting for, God did not send it to the influential, the educated, or the powerful, which is how you would get a message out if the message were yours. He sent it to the men on the night shift, in a back corner of a village of maybe three hundred people. Behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.
Paul says as much in 1 Corinthians 1: God chooses what is foolish and weak in the world to shame the wise and strong, so that at the end of it, the glory can only be his. He works through unlikely people, in unlikely places, by unlikely means. Which means your story is not finished either.
The ham
There is a movie about a church staging its seventy-fifth Christmas pageant, and the year a family of rough, unsupervised kids from the wrong side of town takes the whole production hostage. The oldest girl wanders in, sees a picture of Mary holding Jesus with the word Emmanuel written above it, and cannot look away. That is who I am going to be.
They hear the Christmas story for the first time and they are indignant at it in all the right places. When they find out Herod wants the child dead, they want to go after Herod. Nobody had told them to be reverent, so they are simply, scandalously moved.
Then the brothers come on as the wise men. They have no use whatsoever for frankincense and myrrh, so they bring the most valuable thing their family owns — the Christmas ham somebody had given them — and set it down in front of the manger.
And at the end, the girl playing Mary is holding the baby while everyone sings Silent Night, and a tear runs down her face, and the church realizes it has just watched the best pageant it ever put on.
Sometimes people who are furthest from God see him more clearly than those of us who hear about him every week.
Savior, Christ, and Lord
The angel gives the child three titles, and none of them is decoration.
Savior means one who saves — in the Old Testament, the one who comes for God's people when they have no way of rescuing themselves.
Christ was never a last name. It is a title: the anointed one. In Israel you were anointed as a prophet to speak God's word, or as a priest to intercede for the people, or as a king to lead them. He is all three, and the true one of each.
Lord is the heaviest of the three. The Greek word is Kyrios, and when the Old Testament was translated into Greek, that is the word they used every time the name of God appeared. Nobody in that field was confused about what was being claimed.
That is the good news of great joy, and it was announced for all the people. Peace between God and us, and then peace between us and each other — a peace the world cannot manufacture on its own.
Notice what the shepherds did with it. They did not just hear it. They went, and then they told everybody. That is what love does; when we are truly in awe of something, we cannot keep quiet about it.
The service ended with a single candle lit from the center of the Advent wreath — hope, joy, love and peace already burned through the weeks before — and passed hand to hand until everyone's was lit. Then we blew them out together, because this is the one night we are not called to be silent. Jesus has come, and not to save us from some small enemy, but from sin itself. Believe that. Live it. Then go tell somebody.
