“I just don't feel like Christmas,” is a frequent lament. Exactly how should one feel at Christmas?
William Willimon, when Duke University Chaplain and a professor at Duke Divinity School described his and his wife’s longing and anticipation for the birth of their first child:
“It had been a long, frustrating wait: the tests, the treatments, the discouragement, the unknowing. We wanted a child. But we were learning that a child is one blessing that is a gift - unearned, unachieved, undemanded. ‘We know more about how to help couples not have children than how to help them have children,’ the doctor had said.
“But at last the hoped-for, prayed-for dream became reality. The gynecologist, who in today's upside-down world had spent his day helping people avoid pregnancy, gave my wife the news.
“Through the fall, she grew bigger – ‘great with child,’ as Matthew or Luke would have said. As the December days grew short and cold, we watched this mystery of mysteries unfold.
“Patsy said that she knew the Christmas cantata was not written for our child, but as our little church choir struggled through John Peterson's maudlin Love Transcending, sometimes she caught herself singing for our baby, growing in her womb, rather than for Mary's baby. And on the night of the cantata, when she processed in with the choir, she knew that she was on her way to Bethlehem. When the lector spoke of Mary's being "blessed among women," Patsy said Gabriel was speaking to her. And we rejoiced, like Elizabeth and Mary before us, when they had talked about the advent of their babies.
“That December, we found that there is no better time to be waiting for a child than Advent, when the whole world waits for a baby.”
Too often our images of Christmas have more to do with romantic Currier and Ives prints of a surreal idyllic New England life in the late 1800's than with Scripture or waiting for a child to be born. Popular music echoes this hopeless romanticism in songs like the popular Christmas standard, “It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.” Family, food, and gifts are all good things and may enrich our feelings of Christmas.
However, the real feeling of Christmas is the nervous anticipation that accompanies the birth of a child. The child for whom we wait is to be no ordinary child. In this newborn "the hopes and fears of all the years" are met by a God who meets us where we live. In this newborn, God says, “I love you” to a very messy, broken, world. In this child, God offers the hope of God's continuing activity in a world that seems to have lost its way.
May this Christmas help us all to experience anew the joys, the cries, and the love of that long-awaited child.
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