"Dear God, we just love Christmas!"

Year round, I display a statue which takes center stage on our mantel in December. It is of a little grinning girl (who reminds me of my daughter) delivering a present, accompanied by a just-as-eager dog. Across it are painted the words, "Dear God, we just love Christmas!" I've never known whether that was a prayer, a praise, or just a statement of fact--I think it is all three.

Our celebration of the season touches every sense--the smell of fresh fir and fresh fudge, the gleaming lights, and the sound of Christmas carols. When alone, I can always sing, it seems, in a perfect duet with Nat King Cole or Bing Crosby, or I'm the brother that Karen Carpenter never knew.

But all these lights, gifts, and songs are just touchstones for the center of it all--the celebration of Christ's coming into this world, to live, to die, and to rise again, our ever-living Savior. It is good that each December we unwrap these reminders of His amazing grace, because we so quickly forget. Life is so full, busy, rushed, packed, crowded, and stressed that we easily find ourselves in the Bethlehem innkeeper's sandals--"no room!"

Recently in reading Samuel Zwemer's "The Glory of the Manger," he reminded me of a time when Christians needed few reminders of the meaning of Christmas, because it was as real as the Risen Lord and as fresh as a New Birth:

The church of the first century had no need of any external ceremony to recall the stupendous fact of the incarnation. To Paul the observance of days and months and seasons belonged to Judaism. Every day was Christmas to him--Christ in him the hope of Glory. He required no Christmas card to remind him that God so loved the world. He bore in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus. The only Christmas tree he knew was the tree on Calvary. He was so close to the event that he felt its full and aweful significance. In Paul's epistles we have the most ancient documentary evidence of what the birth of Jesus meant to early Christianity. And it is refreshing to go back to those days and to those records. If you would know the length and breadth and height and depth of God's love for the world in sending His son, read Paul's epistles. No one ever packed more meaning into words than this dauntless missionary, writing to his early converts. Here we have "good measure pressed down, shaken together and running over." There is nothing shallow nor superficial in Paul's Christology.

In our day Christmas has degenerated into a day of hilarious mirth or, what is far worse, a certain dullness of understanding. An American college poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, felt this when she wrote these lines, "To Jesus on His Birthday":

"For this your Mother sweated in the cold,--
For this you bled upon the bitter tree.
A yard of tinsel-ribbon bought and sold,
A paper wreath, a day at home for me.
The merry bells ring out, the people kneel--
Up goes the man of God before the crowd
With voice of honey and with eyes of steel,
He drones your humble Gospel to the proud.
Nobody listens. Less than the wind that blows
Are all your words to us! You died to save--
O Prince of Peace! O Sharon's dewy Rose,
How mute you lie within your painted grave,
The stone the Angel rolled away with tears
Is back upon your mouth these thousand years."

Not so. Christ is alive forevermore. He still speaks to those who will listen. He gave Paul the gospel of the cosmic Christ and John the gospel of the Incarnation. According to both John and Paul the birth of our Saviour at Bethlehem was the one divine event in which all other events culminated. This was the crisis of history, the goal of Old Testament prophecy, the greatest occurrence since the creation and therefore once again "the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy." Paul gives us, in scattered fragments, an outline of the Divine biography revealed to him--the mystery of all the ages, the incarnation of the Son of God:

"He was manifested in the flesh,
Justified in the spirit,
Seen of Angels,
Preached among the nations,
Believed on in the world,
Received up into glory."