Advent Conspiracy 1 – “Worship Fully”
It is the most fascinating, unlikely, incredible story of human existence: the Creator of the cosmos, of the countless galaxies flung across the immeasurable expanse of space, chose to shrink Himself down to a human embryo, in the womb of an unwed teenage mother. Can there be anything more unlikely, more awesome, more life-changing than this? Christmas changed the world 2000 years ago; can Christmas change the world again?
But there are some questions we ought honestly to face this Christmas. To what degree does the coming of God in human flesh color our observance of Christmas, this holiday that has been largely stolen away from us by reindeer, the Grinch, and department stores? How differently does your celebration of Christmas really look from that of your pagan neighbors? We can extend this question to all of life, can’t we, not just Christmas. That’s the telling question, it seems to me: how much difference does Jesus really make? Here’s another way to ask: if Jesus’ birth were ripped out of your celebration of Christmas, or if opening presents on Christmas morning at Grandma’s house were ripped out, which would seem stranger? Which would ruin Christmas most readily for you and your family? What does Christmas—practically—mean to you—and how will you celebrate it this year? I want to challenge us today by considering what Christmas meant to the folks who were there at the first Christmas.
Three responses of people to Christmas:
Ignorance – the vast number of people
Let’s face it: Christmas happened in an out-of-the-way place unnoticed by the majority of the populace of the little town of Bethlehem. It was just another night, on a long journey to pay taxes; people were probably out of sorts (if you dislike paying taxes, imagine having to take a trip to do so!). Mary was just another pregnant woman about town, Joseph just another young father-to-be; we’ve all been there and seen that, nothing odd or unusual in any way. Though we tend to romanticize it greatly, with smiling sheep in the stable, “the ox and lamb kept time, pa rum pum pum pum”, and though we put a beatific smile on Mary’s face and a halo ‘round her head, the fact is that she was a teenage girl who’d never given birth, and despite the angel’s comforting words as to what was taking place, it was still an ordinary birth with the ordinary pains and the added discomfort of the accommodations being something less than the birthing suite at Kennestone! And most of the people of the town went about their business the next day, except for a few who had been bumped into by some crazy shepherds talking about bright stars, a heavenly host of talking angels, and a baby who was the Savior. Wonder what the shepherds had been drinking up on that hillside?
The truth is that most people in Bethlehem missed Christmas. Ah, but the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Scan our contemporary celebration of Christmas, and I’m afraid we find little that is different about it today, except that in the name of One born in a lowly stable, to celebrate His birth, we give…stuff.
Amid all the hype and buying and selling—Jesus the incarnate God sort of gets lost in the shuffle, does He not? The trite little ditty has gotten old in the saying of it, certainly, but some time back, we had to begin to remind people that “Jesus is the reason for the season”. Surely this is because an awful lot of folks had, for all practical purposes, forgotten that fact. Ignorance of Christmas has always been with us.
Hostility – Herod
I won’t spend a lot of time here, simply because apart from the new breed of aggressive, virulent atheists, I’m not sure this happens a great deal today. But the Scriptural record is that there was a pathologically-insecure king who ruled the region of Judea, living a life of luxury but insanely jealous of his power, so much so that he’d had his own family members killed when he felt they posed a threat to his reign. He’d killed ruthlessly to acquire his power, and when word of a tiny king came to him via the wise men, he didn’t hesitate to order the slaughter of all the baby boys in Bethlehem, in a vain attempt to exterminate this imagined threat to his empire.
But the plans of man do not ever frustrate the sovereign will of God, and the hostility of unbelievers never has, and never will, either.
Worship
Christians certainly aren’t hostile to Jesus, like the threatened Herod. Many Christians don’t ignore Jesus either. They have a cantata and put up a manger scene, and get all worked up about the fact that some municipality somewhere in America has taken down the manger scene from the town square. And then they ignore Jesus. Maybe that’s a harsh word, and maybe it overstates the case, but not by much, I fear.
Our hearts are formed by what we worship. What we worship, and how we worship, will tell more about us than just about anything else we can name. Many people celebrate Christmas with worship, all right, but it is surely the worship of a false god, the god of materialism. Rick McKinley says that the fastest growing religion in the world is consumerism, and that those Christians seduced by it have somehow become convinced that Jesus had it all wrong. We’d never say that, of course, but when Jesus said that “man’s life does not consist of the abundance of the things that he possesses”, many people, subconsciously I’m sure, say to themselves, “Jesus had it wrong”. Or at the very least, they behave as though He did.
But there was no such confusion on the first Christmas. Would you look for the common theme running through these five Scriptural accounts?
First, we hear the words of Mary, who poetically expressed her praise to God in response to her relative Elizabeth:
• Mary – Luke 1:46-55
Note the well-known words about the shepherds on a hillside near town:
• Shepherds – Luke 2:8-20
We probably don’t hear the story of Simeon as often, but it belongs as part of the Christmas story as well:
• Simeon – Luke 2:22-35
Anna was a prophetess whose response was the same as that of the others:
• Anna – Luke 2:36-38
Finally, some time later, the wise men came bearing gifts:
• Wise men – Matthew 2:1-12
The thing that was the constant, through each of these accounts of Christmas, is that people worshipped. Their attention was directed to God on the first Christmas. This is what it was all about. Sure, there were other things going on: the shepherds saw angels; Simeon saw the fulfillment of God’s personal promise; the wise men, when they came on the scene some time later, followed a star and brought gifts. There were other things going on, but the one constant was the worship of God because of the event of the incarnation.
What accompanies worship? Obedient submission to the will of God; we see this clearly in all cases except Anna (and little is said of her). Mary humbly accepts God’s lot for her (Luke 1:38); the shepherds go to Bethlehem searching, and leave Bethlehem witnessing; Simeon thanks God for His faithfulness, and humbly accepts His will; the wise men follow God’s leading in not returning to Herod.
But might I suggest that obedience is worship. In Romans 12:1, worship is tied to the obedient offering of ourselves to God—and that’s not unusual, because what we see happening in the Scriptural accounts is people worshipping God through doing what He says, through submitting to His will, through doing what He tells them. And this Christmas, specifically next Sunday, I’ll be challenging each of us to obey God, perhaps in doing some things that depart from the norm…
Finally, note that Christmas is good news for all people. All people, from the kings to the shepherds, from a teenage girl to a couple of old folks. Question: how can this Christmas be good news for all people? In your celebration of Christmas this year, what can you do to make Christmas more than good news for kids and for retailers? We’ll talk more about this one in a couple weeks…
But back to the main point: we celebrate Christmas aright when we worship Jesus fully. Remember our definition of worship? I’ve given it now enough times that even if you don’t have it memorized, it ought to begin to sound familiar: worship is an active response whereby we declare to God the glory due His name. We have not worshipped until we have considered something of God’s inestimable worth, and crafted by some means a response to His worth. And that’s what I want us to do this Christmas: craft a response of worship to God. I want to challenge each of us to do something—something—original as an act of worship this Christmas season.
• Write something.
o A written prayer
o A letter of thanks
o A poem
o An original piece
• Compose something.
o Take a familiar tune—perhaps even a “secular” Christmas tune—and put different words to it (and we’ll sing it!). “Deck the Halls” screams for a Christian rewrite.
o Compose your own
• Craft something (art).
o Sculpt it
o Draw it
o Paint it
• Do something!!!
The point is to take some time this Christmas season for an outside-the-norm, personal worship expression to God for His great Gift—a Savior, Who is Christ the Lord. And do it soon—before the rush of Christmas gets too intense, before you get preoccupied and bogged down, before another Christmas is here and gone and…you’ve gotten caught up in the trappings and missed the point of Christmas: Jesus. Worship—fully, this Christmas season!
Questions for FLOCKs
Share a favorite Christmas memory with the group.
Do you still look forward to Christmas? In what ways? Are there aspects of Christmas that you dislike, even dread? What are those?
Read Luke 2:8-20.
• How are shepherds typically portrayed in Christmas programs?
• Understanding that shepherds were considered societal outcasts in Bible times, why do you think God chose to display His glory through the angels to such outcasts? How does this relate to the heart of Christmas?
• The shepherds worshipped with a sense of wonder—yet we too often experience something less than this. What would it take for us to recapture something of a sense of wonder and gratitude this Christmas?
• What did the shepherds do upon leaving the manger—and what does this suggest to us about the right way to celebrate Christmas?
