They Buried Jesus in a Tomb, Shall We Bury Him in Tinsel?

You are going to get bombarded…are getting bombarded.  And it’s only going to get worse.  The advertisements haven’t geared up fully as yet.  It is my annual call to beware the avalanche that will threaten to bury our holiday in tinsel.

I am a personal proponent of the Ideal that Christmas Season starts at Thanksgiving.

My ongoing response to tinsel overload is to treat the joy and glitz of the Season as the party Jesus never got when he was born.  Yes, there were angels, but they appeared to the shepherds, not mom and dad and the stable crowd. 

But we need to be very, very prepared to understand the real story beneath all the celebration, or it will get buried. 

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son.”  This is the introduction to the Christmas story.  This is the Reason for the Season.  Mary and Joseph, Bethlehem and the shepherds, the Wise Men and the gifts, all of it flows out of God’s love.  I know, it sounds obvious.  But it’s going to get lost, unless we are prepared.

As I reflect on my Christmas experiences, in childhood, as a pastor, the ‘church piece’ was integral to the entire experience.  I still have a sore point, as a child, of securing the role as the narrator at our church’s Christmas pageant only to have to give it up, because we were going to visit relatives YET AGAIN for the stupid holidays.

Ghosts of Christmases past aside, what many good Christians manage is to have their Jesus compartment in the Christmas Season.  There is the Jesus dept., the gift dept., the tree dept., the traditions dept. (which could include who you go to visit, what special foods are made, what rituals your family undertakes, what movies, what music, and the list goes on), the shopping dept., the dept. in our minds that continues to reflect how overblown Christmas has become.  Are you familiar with these departments?  Collectively, theses departments form our Christmas Experience.

I get the shivers just thinking about it, preparing for the tumult that is the Christmas Experience.

Let us return to the Reason for the Season once more.  “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever should believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Thank we all our God!

That is our cross-over.  Thanksgiving.  A date set aside to give thanks, nothing else.  (CLOSE THE STORES!  CLOSE THE STORES!)  It is built around our Christian forebears coming to America and giving thanks that God was not going to leave them to starve.

So, for many, Jesus gets buried in the Season.  For others, Jesus is one department among many in their Christmas Experience.  But I am telling you that we MUST make Jesus preeminent in this Season.  God GAVE Him to us out of love.  I don’t think there is one of us who doesn’t know that, who hasn’t wrapped their brain around that. 

Thanksgiving is the way to wrap our hearts around it.  Thank God for all that is great and wonderful.  Thank God that He loved us!  Thank God that He gave us Jesus.  Thank God for all that is wonderful this Christmas.  Thank God that all the stores celebrate the birth of Jesus (even if they don’t quite get that).  Thank God that He saved our Pilgrim ancestors and, centuries ago, set in motion an opportunity to keep Jesus at the front of the Holiday, not tucked away somewhere in the middle, not forgotten.

 

ABC Family has started their countdown to the countdown for Christmas.  Count down with them, every day giving thanks for the gift of Jesus.