What to Get Jesus for Christmas

Preached at McKinley Hill Friends Church, December 13, 2015

The Birth of Jesus

About that time Caesar Augustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the Empire. This was the first census when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Everyone had to travel to his own ancestral hometown to be accounted for. So Joseph went from the Galilean town of Nazareth up to Bethlehem in Judah, David’s town, for the census. As a descendant of David, he had to go there. He went with Mary, his fiancée, who was pregnant.

While they were there, the time came for her to give birth. She gave birth to a son, her firstborn. She wrapped him in a blanket and laid him in a manger, because there was no room in the hostel.

Luke 2:1-7 (MSG)

Each year many of us go through some sort of dance-like maneuvering to find out what would be a meaningful gift for our brothers, sisters, children, and grandchildren. We want to give a gift that’s useful, that shows we care, but it is not always apparent to us what that gift would be. The needs of each generation are so different and, unless we are a member of that generation, we really can’t predict what gift would be helpful.

Look! A laptop!

I can’t remember a single one of my fellow high school students lugging a computer around with them from class to class. Today, many Middle Schoolers and High Schoolers are required to have with them a tablet computer the size of a manilla envelope, but more powerful than any of the computers readily available when I was in High School, fully loaded with all sorts of "apps" and software programs. Many of their textbooks are now carried around on tablet computers. How am I to know what they need for their classes? Do I sound old? Gifts can be tricky things, especially when generations are so separated by rapidly changing technology and cultural expectations.

Each year, the hint is usually dropped to me via my wife that I need to suggest a few things I want for Christmas, because our families are asking what on earth I want. I usually just say a couple inexpensive things off the top of my head, mostly so that my family can feel like they got me something I needed. The best part of giving gifts is the experience of being generous and helpful to someone else. The truth is that most of the time we don’t really need very much. We are surrounded by affluence and the fact that I often can't readily identify a need simply confirms the depth of my own cultural privilege as a member of western society. Clothes are cheap and easy to come by. We have food and we have a roof over our heads. I am usually just as tickled to get chex mix and homemade jam as more expensive gifts that I don’t really need.

This year I put a little bit more forethought into what gifts could be useful. I started writing down what I would like as a gift whenever the thought occurred to me throughout the year. It’s mostly simple stuff to fill in the gaps of things I already have, or things that I need for the next year. By jotting down what I need throughout the year, I’ve saved myself the frustration of trying to remember, all in one afternoon in early December, what would be a meaningful gift. So this year my Christmas list includes the basics that keep me going: razors, shaving soap, new tires for my bike since the old ones are cracked and need replacing.



While the giving of gifts can become self-serving, and it can seem pointless in a society like ours where many of us have most all of our needs met, hopefully the giving of gifts can be part of our Christmas celebration and devotion. We give gifts at Christmas as a reminder of the greatest gift of all. We give gifts as little acts of love that, in some way, point to the free gift of grace in Christ. When we set up our Nativity scenes, we place front and center the Christ child, as a symbol of God’s grace. The season of Advent anticipates this gift, it builds up to it and we await the coming of Christ into our lives. Advent celebrates the mystery of Christmas, that God took on human flesh. Like the Shepherds, we are expectant for the good news that God is going to do something new, something big in our lives and in our world.

As children, we expected all sorts of bounty for Christmas. Grand and wonderful gifts that we would receive, and often we were disappointed by the somewhat lesser reality. One year I really wanted a sling shot, a fancy sling shot. I really wanted it and I knew if I got it I would be this most skilled hunter who could subdue the wilderness, who could hit moving targets at long range, who would be the envy of all the other boys on the mile-long gravel road I lived on. What I got was a small piece of plywood cut in the shape of a Y with rubber tubing tied on the ends. The thing was unusable. I was better off throwing pebbles than trying to use the sling shot.

I was hoping for something more like this...

In our heads, we think we know what we want, we think we know how something will affect our lives for the better. In reality, we are terrible predictors of anything about the future, and that includes how useful a Christmas gift will be, or how prestigious a new job will make us feel, or how special a new romance will make us feel. Often we are left disappointed.

And here we are at Christmas. We already think we know what we want from God. We already think we know what we want God to do for us in 2016. We already think we know how we will minister to, of what type of help we need. This is Christmas and we know it is to be a season of anticipation for the presence of Christ in our lives and in our world, and we really don’t need any help figuring out what that is to look like.

I was struck in the past month about how unexpected and unanticipated Christmas might actually be. How glad tidings of great joy don't show up in the ways we might expect them. You might have heard on the news about the newborn baby that unexpectedly appeared in a church nativity scene in Queens, New York. Scot Simon’s commentary on NPR highlighted for me just how unexpectedly grace sneaks into our messy lives:

 “A bible story came to life in Queens this week. Jose Moran spent Tuesday morning setting up the Nativity scene at the Holy Child Jesus Church, where he is a custodian. Mr. Moran put up the manger, and went to lunch. And when he came back at about 1 p.m., he heard the cry of a baby.
The baby was in the manger, swaddled in blue towels. He was so young his umbilical cord still sprouted from his belly.
Jose Moran ran to tell Fr. Christopher Ryan Heanue, who has been ordained for only five months. Imagine being a new priest, and told: there's a live baby in your manger.
Fr. Heanue called 911. The baby boy was brought to Jamaica Hospital, where he was weighed—just over five pounds—and found to be healthy.
Surveillance video reportedly shows a young woman enter the church with a baby in her arms, but leave without a child.
New York, like other states, has what's called a safe haven law. It permits parents to leave their infant in some safe place—a hospital, a firehouse, a church—without being charged with child abandonment. It opens a door in the law for parents who may feel burdened, overwhelmed, and unable to take care of their child to safely leave them, with some confidence that they will be found, cared for, and eventually taken in by another family.
Father Heanue says he feels only love for the mother.
"A church is a home for those in need," he told the New York Times, "and she felt, in this stable—a place where Jesus will find his home—a home for her child."
He says families in the parish have already asked to adopt the baby.
"They feel that he was left in the parish and should stay in the parish," he told the New York Post.
The Queens district attorney says the women who left her child in the manger has been located and interviewed. She apparently returned to the church the next day, to see that her baby had been found. She will not be charged.
Bible stories stay compelling over centuries because they show people who struggle to do something good. Jacob wrestles with God. Sarah laughs at Him. Jonah runs away from God and gets swallowed by a whale. Moses, the baby boy left by a river, doubts God and can't enter the Promised Land; even though he's delivered his people from slavery.
This week, the love of a mother who felt she couldn't care for her child led her to bring him some place safe and warm. And he was found by people who will—who already do—love him.” 

A young mother, overwhelmed, over her head, at a loss of what to do, receives a precious gift in the form of a new life, a baby. She could have terminated the pregnancy, but she must have felt that this baby was a precious gift of grace and love and she saw the pregnancy through, not knowing how in the world she could provide for it. She takes it to the only place she can, a place that should love and receive an unexpected gift of grace: a church. She places her baby where the baby Jesus was to lay, in a manger, in the place where you put a baby after you’ve run out of all your other options.

I think of Mary and Joseph wandering the streets of Bethlehem looking for a place to stay, and finally placing their newborn son in the manger. I have a feeling a manger wasn’t their first choice. Their son, who was this gift of God’s grace and love that answered the longings of the world, unrecognized and unexpected. I think of this young woman, loving this child, this gift, that needs a chance at life. And she knows for whatever reason that this child’s life, which she had nurtured and carried for nine months, must now be entrusted into the hands of others.

When Holy Child Jesus Church was planning its Advent calendar, I’m sure they had no idea a new, precious life would take root in their midst. It is crazy, it doesn’t make any sense, it isn’t safe, most people would look down their nose and say it is irresponsible of the mother to drop the child off like that.

“Mary! You are nine months pregnant and travelling to Bethlehem? It’s not safe with you like that! You don’t have reservations? You don’t know what is going to happen? Mary and Joseph, this is irresponsible!”

And a gift is given, hope comes to us, God takes human form.

In the most irresponsible of actions, the world received the most incalculable of gifts. 

For a church in Queens, hearts filled with love and grace have been stirred. A church in Queens gets a Christmas gift it never expected, never anticipated, and it never would have wanted. But this child is with them now, and their love has grown. Their wonder for the ways of God in a messy world has been amplified. A church in Queens gets to live the nativity story in a new way this Christmas, and, maybe, they will experience Christ in more powerful ways. In receiving this child as a gift of God’s grace, Holy Child Jesus Church lives as a continuation of their namesake, of the Incarnation that is at the center of every church.

The church, our church, is a continuation of the Incarnation. In our words, in our reflections, in our love for others, we put flesh on the life of Christ inside us. Nativity scenes are nice, but the best nativity is the new life of Christ in our hearts, which stirs us to love and mercy; a new incarnate life in us that opens our hearts to the strange and unexpected ways Christ becomes real among us. And that is what we bring to Jesus on Christmas and every day: the gift of our surrender to God, which continues the Incarnation in our world. It is these acts of surrender and openness to the ways God chooses to become real in us and among us that reflects God's grace in all of its messy unpredictability.