Christmas Day 2020

A sermon on Titus 2.11-14 | by Richard O. Johnson |

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly, while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds. (Titus 2.11-4)

One of my favorite Christmas memories is an incident that happened back when our daughter Johanna was ae kindergartener at Bell Hill School. I had stopped off at the school for some reason, just a day or two before Christmas vacation was to begin. As I was walking across the schoolyard, I heard footsteps running up behind me, and a child’s voice: “Hey Mister.” It had that kind of urgency that makes you think maybe you dropped your wallet, so I stopped and turned around to discover the source of the voice. I took the little boy to be a first grader, judging by the number of missing teeth in his grin. I had never seen him before, and he had never seen me, but he had a message to deliver: “Hey Mister, you know what?” he asked exuberantly. “What?” I replied. “Christmas isn’t about getting,” he said, “its about giving!”

Was he an angel, right there in the Bell Hill schoolyard? His message could not have seemed more angelic to me if he had been a heavenly host and I had been a shepherd in the fields! Surely God has used more unlikely messengers. But angel or simple child, the boy spoke the Word of God to me that day. Christmas is about giving.

What will you give the Child Christ this Christmas morning? Likely you’ve already opened the gifts you’ve exchanged in your family. But there’s another who should be on your list—the Babe of Bethlehem. What will you give to the Child Christ this day?

What will you give him?

Christina Rosetti wrote a marvelous children’s poem about that question, and perhaps you remember it:

What shall I give him, poor as I am?

            If I were a shepherd, I would give a lamb,

            If I were a wise man, I would take my part,

            But what I have I give him—give him my heart.

It’s a beautiful sentiment. “Give him my heart.” But what does it really mean?

I suppose above all else, it means to give him what you have—and sometimes that seems meager indeed. I’m not talking about material things here, but about the spirit. Give him my heart, yes, but what if my heart is dark and fearful, full of doubts and sorrows? Is that a gift fit for a King? Is that a gift fit for the Child Christ?

Alfons Maria Wachsmann was a Roman Catholic priest, arrested by the Nazis in 1943. He would be executed in February 1944; but on December 23, less than two months before his death, he wrote to his sister:

Never have I knelt at the manger in such poverty as I do this year. Everything has been taken away—my home, my honor, my life. So I want to kneel at the manger of him who had no place to lay his head. . . . As gifts I bear to the manger hunger and cold, loneliness and forlornness. Shining chains are my only ornament. . . . It is in this spirit that I am going to make my pilgrimage to the manger. I hope through grace to celebrate Christmas deep within my heart and mind as I never have before in my life.[1]

Hunger and cold, loneliness and forlornness, shining chains. Who can doubt that those gifts, brought by a condemned man, were more precious to the Child Christ than gold or frankincense?

And so, my friends, it is with the gifts we bring, if they are honestly what we have. If we have sadness or loneliness—and most of us do, in this year of COVID19—this Child welcomes us. If we have fear or uncertainty—and most of us do—this Child rejoices if we present these fears and doubts to him. He does not ask of us a bubbly joy if that is not what is in our heart. Rather he accepts the gift of sadness or fear or anything else that his honestly given, and then embraces us as we are. “Give him my heart”—whatever your heart may contain, that is the gift he desires most of all.

How will you receive him?

But having said this, I want to turn things around just a bit. I love that story about the little boy in the schoolyard, but here, in the Christian family, here among friends, I need to tell you that the little boy actually didn’t have it entirely right. Christmas isn’t all about giving. It’s about receiving. And that is sometimes the hardest thing of all.

When my daughter had long grown out of Bell Hill School, we went to visit her at college. She was dating a young man she met in the band. It was band concert weekend, and this fellow’s family, whom we had never met, was visiting him as well. We all went to the band concert that evening, and then went out to a restaurant for dessert. I asked the server to give me the check, which she did—there were eight or nine of us, but it couldn’t have come to more than twenty-give bucks or so. The boy’s father, a very successful businessman, wanted to know what his share was. “Oh, I’ve got it,” I said. But as we left the restaurant, the other father literally forced a twenty-dollar bill into my hand. I didn’t want to make a scene, so I accepted it. The next day I slipped it to the young man, who was saving money to buy a new tuba that his Dad wouldn’t spring for. “I think your Dad meant for you to have this,” I said.

Yes, it is difficult to receive with grace. Receiving a gift is to admit that we are not self-sufficient, that we might perhaps be needy in some way, that we are not entirely in control. Perhaps that is a lesson we have learned only too well in these past months. So many things are beyond our control, beyond our ability even to understand.

And on this Christmas Day, as on all other days, truth be told, all we can do is to receive. The real giver is God. There is no paying him back, no insisting on paying our own way, no balancing the scales. The scales are completely weighted, and we are the receivers. God is the giver. “He it is who gave himself,” wrote St. Paul. For us, Christmas is about receiving—receiving a priceless gift that we in no way deserve and couldn’t have asked for, couldn’t even have imagined!

Sigrid Undset, the wonderful Norwegian novelist, once expressed it this way:

And when we give each other Christmas gifts in his name, let us remember that he has given us the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans and all that lives and moves upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit—and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused. And to save us from our own foolishness and from all our sins He came down to earth and gave us Himself.[2]

Gave us himself, yes. But it’s almost too easy to say those words. What does it mean?

The gifts of the Child Christ

My very favorite Christmas story is by George MacDonald, entitled “The Gifts of the Child Christ.” It’s a difficult story, and rather long. I hope maybe you will look it up and read it for yourself, for a quick retelling cannot express its powerful message. But let me share with you the main story line.

Phosy was a 5-year-old girl whose life was rather dreary. Oh, she had plenty of things—toys and clothes, a house to live in, plenty to eat. But her house was devoid of love. Her mother had died giving birth to her, and her father had never quite forgiven her. He had remarried a much younger woman, who wasn’t much interested in Phosy. And if the truth were told, Phosy’s father wasn’t much interested in his new wife. She had seemed attractive, but after their marriage he found her rather shallow, and so he spent most evenings alone in his den, smoking cigars and reading books. Phosy thus spent most of her time in the care of Alice, the maid. She went to church because her parents took her, thinking it was the proper thing to do. As Advent turned toward Christmas, she heard the story of the coming birth, and she looked forward to it with great excitement and imagination. When Jesus was born, she knew, it would be wonderful, and he would bring wondrous gifts.

Another birth was anticipated, but Phosy had not been told. Her stepmother was becoming great with child. There was little excitement about this birth. The father was no more interested in this new baby than he was in his young wife or young Phosy. And so no one had told Phosy what was expected. As it happened, Phosy’s stepmother gave birth late on Christmas Eve, but the little boy she bore died at birth. Christmas Day dawned as a day of mourning in a house that was already much too cold.

But when Phosy awoke, she expected to find the Baby Jesus. “She crept out of the room and down the stair. The house was very still. What if Jesus should come and find nobody awake? Would he go away again and give them no presents?” Puzzling about this, Phosy passed a bedroom where a candle burned on a table next to the bed. She caught sight of something that drew her inside—could it be? The loveliest of dolls she could ever imagine. It was the essence of loveliness—with its alabaster face, and its delicate fingers. But then she realized that it was a real baby. Of course—it must be the Baby Jesus himself! She picked him up and tenderly cradled him in her arms. But then she noticed he was not breathing, and he was so cold. Phosy was sad, so sad at heart, but she kept holding him close, rocking him in her arms.

Some moments later the nurse discovered her, and frantically called her father. He came rushing into the room, saw the girl, sitting as a speechless mother of sorrow, bending in the dim light of the tomb over the body of her holy infant. She looked up at her father. “‘Jesus is dead,’ she said slowly and sadly. “He came too early and there was no one to take care of him, and he’s dead.’” And she began to weep.

The maid Alice had come into the room, and she quickly snatched the lifeless body from Phosy’s arms as her father clasped his daughter to his bosom. “No, no, darling,” he said tenderly, “Jesus is not dead, thank God. It is only your little brother that hadn’t life enough, and is gone back to God for more”

Later that day, at Christmas dinner, her father realized that he was looking at young Phosy with different eyes, somehow with more tenderness. And in the days to come, their common loss brought him and his young wife together in sorrow. “As soon as she was able to bear it, he told her the story of the dead Jesus, and with that tale came to her heart love for Phosy. She had lost a son for a season, but she had gained a daughter forever.”

“Such were the gifts the Christ-child brought to one household that Christmas,” MacDonald concludes. “And the days of the mourning of that household were ended.”[3]

What gifts, dear friends, will the Child bring to you? Himself, yes, to be sure—but how? In the loneliness of grief, or the tenderness of love; in the quietness of solitude, or the restlessness of anxiety—in unexpected ways and places, and through unanticipated people—he will come to you. The gifts he will bring to you are no different from what he asks of you. What he has, he gives you—gives his heart, his love, himself. Wonderful gifts.

 

Pastor Richard O. Johnson

Grass Valley, CA

roj@nccn.net

 

[1] Helmut Gollwitaer, Käthe Kuhn, and Reinhold Schneider, eds. Dying We Live: The final messages and records of the German Resistance (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 113.

[2] Sigrid Undset, Christmas and Twelfth Night (London, 1932), quoted in Edward Wagenknecht, ed., Jesus in the World’s Literature (New York: Creative Age Press, Inc., 19460, 3ff.

[3] George MacDonald, The Gifts of the Child Christ: Fairy Tales and Stories for the Childlike, ed. by Glenn Edward Sadler (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1973), 1:32ff.