God With Us

​I begin with a confession that will probably not surprise many of you. I am not very good at Christmas.
 
If you didn’t know me, and you came to my house, that might surprise you because we (I use the term “we” loosely) are very good at Christmas. My family does not mess around. We are all in.
 
Our house shines with Christmas lights inside and out. We have two blow-up Santas and a blow-up Frosty. Our tree is richly decorated, with lots of presents underneath. We have Christmas chachkas more or less everywhere. We listen to Christmas music. We have an Advent calendar and an Advent wreath. Our fridge is stuffed with Christmas food. Our stockings are hung by the mantle with care. Christmas is everywhere in our house.
 
All that Christmas takes a lot of work. And in our house, poor Carrie does virtually all of it. Carrie is committed to making Christmas special for her three children, all of whom are technically adults and the oldest of whom is me.
 
Now the preparatory work is largely done, and the fun begins. Our next twenty-four hours will be one family tradition after another.
 
My favorite activity is our Christmas scavenger hunt, which comes after we go through our stockings and before we get to the presents under the tree. Beginning near our stockings, Carrie hides slips of paper with riddles on them all around our house. Benjamin and Nicholas compete to answer the riddle. Then they turn over the slip of paper to find what room the next riddle is hidden in. They dash for that room, with Carrie following as best she can. And the whole thing repeats. Ten times.
 
My role in the scavenger hunt is to be obstructive. I stand in the doorway or on the stairs or wherever I can effectively block Benjamin and Nicholas, and keep them from getting where they want to go for as long as I can.
 
I could never hold them for long. Even when they were little, Benjamin and Nicholas were remarkably good at squirming by me. Now they don’t need to squirm. The challenge is for them tomorrow will be moving me out of the way without officially injuring me. Thankfully they are both good at that. The result is a thirty-minute wrestling match that moves all around our house, with short breaks to answer riddles.
 
I don’t know how many more years I can do this. It doesn’t seem like something we’ll want to do when I am 80 and they are both middle-aged. But I can’t imagine Christmas without our scavenger hunt.
 
I love that “we” are so good at Christmas. I love that we mark this time and this season as special for our family in so many ways.
 
But I am really glad that our actual Christmas celebration begins here, at Church. Because Christmas is about more than food, and presents, and scavenger hunts. Christmas is about more even than family.
 
What makes this season special for all of us, no matter how or even whether we do Christmasy things, is Christ, baby Jesus, whose birth we celebrate this evening. At their best, all of our Christmas fun revolves around Jesus. And the danger is that Christmas fun distracts us from Jesus.
 
We gather this evening to make sure that doesn’t happen. We gather to hear again the good news of great joy that to us is born this day our Savior, the Messiah, the Lord. We gather to sings Christmas songs of praise to our incarnate God. We gather to share the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. We gather as Christian people to celebrate Christ, the reason for the season, the justification for all our festivities, the beating heart at the center of all true and good Christmas action.
 
This is a time of gladness.
 
But in the midst of all the fun, we should also pause to remember the circumstances into which Jesus was born. His parents were poor and on the move, thanks to Rome’s requirement that everyone go to their ancestral home to be registered. Jesus’ mother gave birth to him in a manger because there was no room for people like them at the inn.
 
Jesus’ birth itself was joyful. Shepherds showed up to help celebrate, and to share the news that angels were celebrating Jesus’ birth along with Mary and Joseph. It was a lot for Mary to ponder.
 
But the holy family couldn’t ponder in peace for long because King Herod was filled with rage and fear and jealousy at word that the true king of the Jews was born. While Jesus was still just an infant, the holy family had to flee to Egypt as refugees to avoid Herod’s murderous rampage, and they couldn’t return home until after Herod’s death.
 
Their circumstances remind us of all the suffering people in our world, the people who can’t go home to enjoy a feast with family and friends, or exchange presents with people they love, or go on a scavenger hunt tomorrow morning.
 
But the most important thing about Mary and Joseph in those years of hardship was not their suffering, important though their suffering was. The most important thing about Mary and Joseph was that Christ was with them through it all, Christ who is Immanuel, God with us.
 
Christ was with Mary and Joseph. And Christ promises to be with us all always, which means that Christ is also with the people in our own time who are struggling. That is a consolation and a strength in difficult times.
 
Happily, Christ is with the rest of us, too, as we celebrate his birth in whatever way we do.
 
Christ with us always is the good news of Christmas. Christ with us always is the source of true Christian joy, in good times and bad. Christ with us always is what we celebrate tonight.
 
And so, on this most holy night, I thank God for coming to us in the birth of the Christ child. I thank Christ for remaining with us always. And I pray that God will fill us with the true and deep joy of this Christmas season.
 
In Christ’s name. Amen.