Christmas Thoughts

 

The following was a little talk I gave at Friday night’s annual Bethany Christmas banquet. A couple of people have mentioned that they would like to see it posted so here it is:

Christmas is for all of us, but Christmas is especially for kids. So tonight I want to tell you about a few of the ways that Christmas connects with the stuff of daily life… from the perspective of a four year old.

Scene 1
So we’re sitting down for lunch one day and, over grilled cheese and noodle soup, Julie looks at me quizzically and asks,

“Daddy, where does God live? I know he doesn’t live in Hepburn because I’ve never seen him. I think he lives at the beach with Noah.”

When Julie was little we used to read a book that depicted Noah and the flood and she’s always wondered if God doesn’t live at the beach with Noah.

So does God live in Hepburn? Because the question is not just for four year olds, it’s a question for all of us. Does God live here, at Bethany? So we come to this season and we remind ourselves that Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, not God out there somewhere watching from a distance. Not God remote, detached, uninterested, uncaring but God with us, God for us, God come down to share in our experience, to share in our lives and redeem them.

So does God live in Hepburn? Well yes he does. Because the Christmas story reminds us that God living in Bethlehem and Nazareth is no less odd and no less hopeful than God living in Hepburn.

Scene 2
So we’re sitting down at the table, getting ready to do a puzzle when Julie fixates on her index finger. She stares at it for a while, starts to pick away at it, looks intently at it before finally confessing to me that she has an owie. Owies are a big deal for a kid. In this case it’s a sliver she picked up somewhere along the line. So I start picking away, trying dislodge the sliver from her hand. And we start talking.

“Daddy, you can’t get the sliver out, your hands are too big.”

Point taken. When God gave me my hands it seems that he had tasks other than sliver picking in mind.

“Daddy, I think we should get a band aid for my finger.”

Yes, we probably should. In the mind of a four-year-old, there are not a lot of problems that a band aid can’t fix. And then as we got rid of the sliver and started to put the band-aid on, she looked at me with a philosophical look in her eye and said, “Daddy, I wish no one ever got any owies”.

And I stopped. And I thought about my life and I thought about the lives of my friends and family, and I thought about the lives of the people in this room, and all the people whose lives I know only from a distance. And I thought about all the owies that we carry. Some are physical, some are emotional, some are small and some are big, some we share with others, many we keep to ourselves.

And I said, “Yes Julie, I wish that too. I wish no one ever got any owies.”

Christmas starts to answer the question about our owies. Because the Christmas story doesn’t end with a baby in a manger, the Christmas story ends with a man on a cross and with an empty tomb. The Christmas story ends with God taking all the owies of a hurting and a broken world onto himself and triumphing over them in the resurrection.

Scene 3
Most days I come home for lunch. I don’t always get breakfast with my kids but most days I get lunch. We are developing a ritual where dad gets all bundled up to walk to work and both girls run and try to knock him over with a hug before he gets to leave. Julie seems to see the affection in the procedure. Lana, well I think she really wants to take me out. Something about the way she grits her teeth makes me nervous, but that’s another story.

The other day as I was getting ready to go back for the afternoon Julie says to me, “Daddy, I like second work best.”

” Second work? What’s second work?”

“Second work comes after first work.”

“Thank you Julie. Can you be more specific?”

“Second work is the work that comes after lunch. I like second work best because I know that after second work you’re staying home for the rest of the day.”

Ahh, I see. Second work is better than first work because second work holds the promise of an evening full of watching Robin Hood and eating popcorn with dad. Somehow, in this little four year old brain, the afternoon feels different than the morning. Because the afternoon is lived with the expectation that daddy’s coming home soon.

The Christmas story reminds us that we live during ‘second work’. Christmas was ‘lunchtime,’ a break in the schedule where God came home for an all-too-brief visit. But he had to leave and so now we live in the afternoon. Mostly we do the same kinds of things we did in the morning. We fight with our siblings over who gets to play with the toys. We watch movies and try not to make our parents mad. We get owies and hope that the bandaids make them go away. We play house and we play games, we make friends and we make enemies, we get degrees and we get jobs.

But as people who take the Christmas story seriously, the afternoon feels different than the morning. Because we know that, even though Jesus is gone, ‘second work’ means that the afternoon is full of expectation that soon these activities will be shared with God himself.

One of my favourite Christmas carols is O Little Town of Bethlehem. The song is addressed to the town itself, a small, insignificant place that could not possibly imagine the significance of what was happening within its limits. A town not altogether unlike Hepburn. Mainly I’m drawn to the song because of how its first verse ends.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light;

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.