It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. I’m not talking about the weather. Or the shopping. But the movies. I love Christmas movies (not the Hallmark ones)… We’re all watching a lot of movies these days… I love the quotes from Christmas movies:
The Grinch w/ Jim Carey
- 1st DVD we bought as a family
- “Bleeding hearts of the world unite.”
- “One man’s toxic sludge is another man’s potpourri.”
Christmas Vacation w/ Cousin Eddie
- The TV version is not the same as the theatrical version!
- “If this gets dented then my hair just ain’t gonna look right.”
- “If it isn’t too much I’d like to get somethin’ for you Clark, somethin’… real nice.”
Elf—Buddy
- “You sit on a throne of lies!”
- “Francisco! That’s fun to say! Francisco.”… Starbucks
Perhaps one of the most important Christmas quotes is from Scripture: Fear Not. The Angelic warning of Fear Not bookends the Nativity story. And between those bookends we find what Christmas is all about.
We like to wonder about what was going through minds of the characters in the Christmas story. What conversations they had… We might humorously imagine a conversation between Joseph and his new and expectant wife Mary that went something like this:
Mary & Joseph 2020 Video
Jon Crist is a super funny comedian. I reached out to him to ask for permission to use that video in our service, and he graciously agreed.
All joking aside, the story of Christmas is a very serious story indeed. It literally starts and ends with a warning and the heavy words, Fear Not (I’m not including when the Angel also tells Mary to Fear Not because that’s much earlier in the story, literally at the conception of her pregnancy and a lot of other stuff happens in between. So I’m just focusing on the actual Nativity narrative).
In the Nativity narrative, the first time the angel says Fear Not is to Joseph in a dream, as recorded in Matthew 1:
“Joseph, son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
The second time the Angel says Fear Not is to the Shepherds on a hillside outside of Bethlehem, hard at work in the middle of the night, as recorded in Luke 2:
“Don’t be afraid, for look, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people: Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be the sign for you: You will find a baby wrapped tightly in cloth and lying in a manger.”
In those bookend verses of the Nativity we read what Christmas is all about. Maybe this would be a good time to bring up the classic Peanuts Christmas. I love how Linus reads the Christmas story at the end to remind everyone what Christmas is all about. We need that reminder today still. What does the Angel tell Joseph? “Fear Not. Why? Because Jesus will save people from their sins.” And what do the Angels tell the Shepherds? “Fear Not. Why? Because a Savior is born.” That, my friends is what Christmas is all about.
You may have heard some different takes on the meaning of Christmas and the Christmas story… on social media? I don’t want to take too much time, but it’s important that we think clearly and rightly about something as significant as the meaning of Christmas and the incarnation. I’m gonna be a Scrooge here, but it has to be done. Sure, some of these statements may have some circumstantial connection to the Nativity, but it’s wrong to suggest that anything other than Jesus born as Savior is the message of Christmas. You may have heard…
Christmas is about believing what a woman said about her sex life.
No,
Christmas is about believing what a woman said about her sex life.
Christmas is not about #metoo. Mary wasn’t assaulted, raped or humiliated for her unexplained pregnancy; in in fact Joseph’s initial intent to divorce her quietly was spare her public humiliation. And there was no woman who came before Mary with a similar experience; none since. She was, is and will always be the only one. Mary wasn’t #metoo’d. Why did the Angel tell Joseph marry Mary even though she was already pregnant? To believe some story about her sexuality? No. The Angel told Joseph to marry her and to believe God that Mary’s baby was the Savior. What might actually seem creepy to us, is that Joseph could very well have been 40 years old, marrying Mary, a girl as young as 14. But that was cultural, and it isn’t what Christmas is all about either. Does God care about the sexually abused? Absolutely, but that’s not what the Christmas story is about.
Christmas is about a family finding safety as asylum seekers.
No,
Christmas is about a family finding safety as asylum seekers.
Christmas is not about immigration reform. If the Christmas story is about opening up borders, then it’s truly a terrible story. Thousands of babies found no asylum and were murdered at the hands of Herod in his mad rage to execute this newborn rival King of the Jews. The holy family escaped to Egypt, not because of Egypt’s amnesty laws, but at the prompting of the Angel. Jesus came, not die as a baby, but as a Savior on the cross. Does God care for the persecuted and those seeking asylum? Absolutely, but that’s not what the Christmas story is about.
Christmas is about a child in need receiving support from the wealthy.
No,
Christmas is about a child in need receiving support from the wealthy.
Christmas is not about wealth redistribution. The wisemen brought valuable gifts to the holy family because they followed a star that led them to a new King. Their gifts were offered as worship to that King. We have no reason to think that Joseph struggled in providing for his family, he was likely well-established by the time he took Mary as his wife, and there’s no reason to think they were impoverished. What’s more, the gifts of the Magi serve to foreshadow the death and burial of Jesus. Does God care for the poor? Absolutely, but that’s not what the Christmas story is about.
Christmas is about God identifying with the marginalized, not the powerful.
No,
Christmas is about God identifying with the marginalized, not the powerful.
Christmas is not about identifying with the marginalized, unless you consider all of humanity are the marginalized. “All the poor and powerless,” that we sing, that’s all of us. Jesus made his mission and purpose clear in Luke 19:10: “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost.” You have never met a marginalized person who did not need the Savior Jesus. And you have never met a powerful person who did not need the Savior Jesus. Come to Jesus marginalized or powerful, it matters not. Jesus is indiscriminate in his mission to save. Thank God for that.
You see, each of those assertions would take away from the one central truth, the true meaning and message of Christmas. God expertly managed the birth of the Savior—it had been foretold and predicted for centuries, from as early as the Garden. Everything was as it was prophesied, nothing was left to chance and nothing took central prominence other than the coming of the Savior. That expert management continued all the way up through the last week of Jesus’ life. Nothing was left to accident, and there was no side agenda. Jesus came to save the world, period.
Friends, we must be careful not to press our paradigms, our agendas, our emotions into our Scripture, or buy into it when someone else propagates such ideas. It happens all the time, and we don’t always catch it because it usually makes for great tweets and re-tweets. It might even sound good to our modern-day ears and sensibilities. Of course Scripture addresses social flourishing and all the ways we can do that as families, communities, and nations. And we can draw those principles out through the study of Scripture. But my point here is that it’s poor handling of the text to infuse our modern-day hot-topics of immigration, wealth-distribution, and sexuality into an event like Christmas that took place 2000 years ago within its own distinct political and social construct; a narrative that had a specific and explicitly stated purpose: The good news that God has come in the flesh to save us all! Don’t let anything else subvert that message this Christmas.
To help us understand the message of Christmas, rather than drawing upon our own culture, it would help to reflect upon the culture of the ancient world. We operate in a innocence/guilt world today. Our society imposes laws to enforce and incentivize compliance to our values. We expect a person to internalize that morality as an individual, and to suffer the consequences of breaking the laws as an individual. But in the ancient world, and in many non-western cultures still today, the community valued honor as its highest commodity, and a sense of shame in knowing what to do in all circumstances. Honor/shame.
How we think about things such as marriage, age differences, pre-marital pregnancy, family, long-distance travel, and on and on, aren’t the same as how people in the ancient world understood those concepts.
This is tricky to explain because we use the word Shame so differently today. For us, the words shameful and shameless are synonymous. If you’re shameful or shameless, you’re basically a bad person. But having a sense of shame—think shameful—wasn’t a bad back then… The closest we may get to this use in our culture is like when you someone of a previous generation perhaps say, “Have you know shame?” In other words, if you had shame, you would know how to behave. And in the ancient world like when Mary and Joseph lived, if you had no shame, you were shameless, and then you were shamed by the community.
Men had a corner on honor, and there was only so much honor to go around. If you lost your honor, someone else gained it. We see this in the public discourses throughout Scripture… like when Jesus spoke to the crowds and the Pharisees. Public exchanges weren’t about gathering information; it was about challenging another’s honor and gaining more honor for yourself. And in the case of the Pharisees, they tried to trap Jesus in the honor game publicly—so that he would be dishonored in front of all the crowds—but they lost, and so their honor was dinged, over and over. Eventually their only recourse was to trap him and put him to death to restore their honor: he was publicly beaten, spit upon, stripped naked, paraded through town, hung on a cross between 2 legitimate criminals, buried in a borrowed tomb. His dishonor couldn’t have been made more public. By contrast, his disciples and others like Nicodemus, they would ask Jesus questions later, in private or in a smaller group; They weren’t challenging his honor but truly seeking to understand.
Women in that world had a sense of shame. Remember, we’re not talking about shame like we talk about it today. Shame wasn’t a negative identity, but positive. This meant that she knew and understood how to act in order to not become shameless in the sight of her family or community.
Why would women carry shame? 2 ways:
- In a culture where blood was considered the ultimate sign of ritual uncleanliness, monthly menstruation created a constant cycle of shame.
- In that culture, there was no modern scientific understanding of conception; in their limited grasp of biology, the man passed on all the genetic information (his seed) to form a new child in the woman’s womb; the woman contributed no DNA, she was merely the incubator. One of the woman’s primary functions in society was to bear children. If a woman couldn’t bear a child—she was considered barren and lost her shame.
Think through all the Bible stories you know and love… Abraham & Sarah, Joseph and Rachel & Leah, David & Bathsheba, Zachariah & Elizabeth, young Jesus speaking in the Temple, Jesus & the Woman at the Well, Jesus with Mary & Martha, Peter preaching to the crowds at Pentecost, Paul and Philemon… How do Honor/Shame come into play? In all of these and many more, if we underplay those dynamics or don’t understand it, we miss important aspects of the story.
Let’s bring this back to our Nativity story. Joseph had every right to divorce Mary based on her apparent unfaithfulness—he could divorce her and maintain his honor. But the Angel tells him: Fear Not. Why? Because Mary will give birth to the Savior. You may have every reason to fear, Joseph, but Fear Not.
We know the story… Joseph and Mary were married and they travelled to Bethlehem, and they refrained from sexual intimacy in order to preserve the integrity of Jesus’ miraculous conception. There Mary delivered the child. And in Luke 2 we see the scene unfold with the Shepherds visited by the Angelic host.
Or how about how amazing that lowly Shepherds, losers in the honor game, were the first among anyone in all of history to do these 3 significant things:
- The first to hear about Jesus. The first Christian disciples. How frightening it must have been to encounter those heavenly messengers and receive such a message.
- The first to worship Jesus. The first Christian worshipers. How terrifying it must have been to brave leaving their posts to venture into town to do something as peculiar as worshiping a baby.
- The first to tell others about Jesus. The first Christian evangelists. How fearful it must have been to consider the societal divide they would have to cross in order to spread the news of what they saw and heard.
I’m certain they were afraid, and for good reason. But the Angel tells him: Fear Not. Why? Because a Savior has been born. Shepherds, you may have every reason to fear, but Fear Not.
If you tell me Fear Not, “don’t be afraid,” it usually means one of three things:
- I wasn’t afraid, but thanks to you, I am now!
- I’m not afraid, but I should be, but you’re trying to distract me! I can’t trust you!
- I was already afraid and for good reason, but you’re trying to ease my fear. You’re telling it will be alright.
What the Angels are saying is, “I know you have good reason to be afraid right now, but trust me when I tell you that it’s going to be alright.” Remember what Christmas is all about? “Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” Jesus is born to be the Savior of all. Put it this way: The Divine puts on flesh in the form of Jesus Christ to identify with humanity so that humanity can put on Christ to identify with the Divine. In short, God became flesh to save us all. That’s what Christmas is all about. Whatever the circumstance—Joseph, Shepherds, you and me—don’t be afraid because your Savior is here.
As I think about Joseph and the shepherds, I wonder about my own fears. How about you? COVID. The vaccination. Income. Bills. At-risk family members. Regretting mistakes of the past, words spoken out of anger, mistreated a spouse or kids. Pressures of today or plans for tomorrow. Have you lain awake in bed at night allowing thoughts to race, worrying about things that are almost sure to never materialize, but gripped with fear just the same. Gears in your head spinning. Heart racing. Breathing increases. What you wouldn’t give to fall asleep. And if that angel could whisper in a dream, Fear Not. A Savior is born. You may have reason to be afraid, but Fear Not.
Or what about our calling we have as the Church, this community of believers? Christ’s Body on earth. We are now the disciples, the worshipers, the evangelists. It may seem overwhelming compared to that first night’s task put upon the shepherds. We are on a two-millennia-long journey of making disciples who are then compelled to take the message of the Gospel to the entire world through all time and in all places. It’s unbelievable. It’s too much work. Too much opposition. Too much mocking. Too much to get tripped up on along the way. Too much to get our heads around. We have very good reason to be afraid, but the Savior has come. Fear Not Church.
“I know you have good reason to be afraid right now, but trust me when I tell you that it’s going to be alright.” The Angel brings us tidings, assurance in the midst of our fears… that everything is going to be alright.
How can this be? Why is the Savior being born mitigation for our fears? Paul puts it succinctly in Ephesians 2:14: "Christ himself is our peace.” Like Joseph, I can Fear Not because Christ is my peace. Like the Shepherds, you don’t have to be afraid because Christ is your peace. No matter the situation, Fear Not. For Christ is our peace. Hear that this morning. Hear that this Christmas. He is your peace.
Can I teach you a chorus, and maybe this is something you can sing to yourself in moments of fear or distress, this Christmas or whenever, as an encouragement, a reminder of the peace of your Savior:
Oh Lord You are my peace
And I rest beneath Your wings
You are my rock
You are my shield
Oh Lord You are my peace
Christ’s Table is a table of peace. When we pull up to his Table, we are profoundly reminded that our Savior has come, he is here, and he is our peace. We Fear Not because of Jesus. All that we’ve talked about today: Fear Not, our Savior is born, he is our peace… It’s all at the Table of the Lord. So come…
As we eat the bread that signifies his body, we have No Fear because Christ is our peace… sing. As we drink the cup that signifies his blood, we have No Fear because Christ is our peace.