Keeping Christmas Well

Keeping Christmas Well

Luke 1:26-38

December 24, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

The very first doctor to perform a successful human-to-human heart transplant was Dr. Christiaan Barnard in December 1967. The patient was Louis Washkansky, a 54-year-old grocer who had diabetes and incurable heart disease, and the operation took place in Cape Town, South Africa. Dr. Barnard commented later that the decision to undergo such a new and risky procedure wasn’t a difficult one for Washkansky. Barnard wrote, “For a dying man it is not a difficult decision because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water, convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side.” Washkansky knew he was dying, so he was willing to take whatever risk was necessary to receive a new heart. He lived for eighteen days before dying of pneumonia, but his willingness to undergo the operation helped untold numbers of people in the future as doctors learned more and more about helping people have new hearts.

During Advent, you might say we have been trying to make a heart transplant that will last. We have been taking a look at the spiritual state of our hearts as we weighed our lives against the fictional life of Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ classic story A Christmas Carol and we’ve been aiming to change our humbugs into hallelujahs this Christmas. Humbug is far easier; it goes with the nature of the world. Hallelujah requires us to risk entrusting our hearts to God, allowing God to do the surgery he needs to do—and that’s scary. It’s risky. As many of you know, last year at this time, I was just coming back from the recovery from my second heart valve replacement surgery. The first one I had was in 1999; I intend the second one to be the last one! On both occasions, I didn’t realize how much I had been affected by my leaky valve until after the surgery, and though this recovery took longer than the first, I can tell a big difference from before the surgery to after. The same thing is true of our spiritual heart. We usually don’t realize how leaky or broken our heart is; we get used to the way things are. That was certainly true of Scrooge. He was the way he was and, as far as he could remember, had always been that way.

Most of you probably know the story of Scrooge, how on this particular Christmas Eve he encountered the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley had been dead for seven years, but he told Scrooge he had come to help him have a better ending to his life. As I’ve reminded you along the way, Dickens is not writing Christian theology here. He isn’t really telling us about ghosts or spirits; he’s making his point by using them as story devices. So, in the story, Marley the ghost was to send three spirits who would help Scrooge change the course of his life. Early on, that outcome is in doubt, but by the time the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future have visited with Scrooge and shown him his life and death, he is quickly becoming someone different than the man we met at the beginning of the book. When we left him, yesterday morning, he had fallen into his own grave. Kind of scary! He falls and then he wakes up, and it’s Christmas morning.

VIDEO CLIP: “Keeping Christmas Well”

That’s not the same Scrooge we started with four weeks ago. Scrooge has been miraculously transformed from the inside out. Life will be different, he pledges. Life is new. Even the cold feels good. A miracle transformation from humbug to hallelujah changes the way we see everything, and it starts as we open our hearts.

Tonight was have come to celebrate the way the baby of Bethlehem brings miracle transformations to lives still today, and the first transformation happened before he was even born. The story is so familiar that we often miss the scandal of a young unmarried girl being met by a presumably male angel, who says that she will become pregnant in a miraculous way. Mary is told she is “favored” by God, and because of that “favor,” she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, a scandal at the least in those days. That “favor” continues as she gives birth to a child who would grow into a man who would then be executed as a criminal (Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, pg. 52). God has a strange way of “favoring” people! When we ask for “God’s favor,” we’re usually expecting God to make some kind of guarantee that everything will work out, that everything will be fine. That’s not what God does here. The only promise God gives Mary is that he will be with her (1:28). Mary didn’t plan for this, that’s for sure. She was going about her own business, trying to obey God as best as she could, when suddenly her life is turned upside down. At this point she has a choice: she can either go along with God and be transformed, or reject God’s plan and stay the way she is. Mary’s response? “May your word to me be fulfilled” (1:38). What is it about Mary that makes her choose this transformation?

Perhaps it is her humility. Mary is “greatly troubled”—other translations say “surprised”—that the angel is visiting her (1:28). She wasn’t trying to impress God by the way she lived her life. She didn’t try to get any sort of special attention. It never occurred to her that God would use her in in any special way. And when the angel explains to her what God plans to do, her response is not, “Okay, whatever.” She explicitly accepts God’s plan: “May your word to me be fulfilled” (1:38). Humility is not weakness; it is having enough strength to be able to serve. It’s serving without worrying about who’s getting the credit. Humility includes seeing ourselves the way God sees us: dearly loved, but not above others. It’s the attitude Paul describes in Philippians: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:3-5). We see that in Dickens’ story. When Scrooge awakes on Christmas morning, he has been humbled by all he had experienced, so he begins to retrace his steps and make things right, first with his clerk Bob Cratchit. Humility opens our hearts so we can be transformed by God.

Mary also made herself available to God. God took the initiative. He sought out Mary because she had “found favor” with him (1:30). When God approaches, Mary affirms her availability: “I am the Lord's servant,” she tells the angel (1:38). “I’m ready to do whatever he asks. I’m available for what God wants to do.” And then she learns that what God wants to do is the impossible. Mary says, “I can’t become pregnant. I’m a virgin. I don’t know much about biology, but I know this is impossible!” But, you know what? Impossible doesn’t scare God. Impossible is what God specializes in. Abraham and Sarah were too old to become parents; it was impossible. The people living in the land of Canaan could not be defeated by the tribes of Israel; it was impossible. Elizabeth and Zechariah were also too old to become parents; it was impossible. But when people make themselves available to God, the impossible becomes not just possible but reality. To Sarah, God says, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” (Genesis 18:14). To Mary, the angel says, “No word from God will ever fail” (1:37). And Jesus later will tell some disciples, “What is impossible with man is possible with God” (Luke 18:27). “A barren woman can bear a child. A virgin can conceive. The Lord can enter human history as a child. From a tomb can come resurrection, and the Holy Spirit can empower the church for its worldwide mission” (Culpepper 52). When God’s people make themselves available, nothing is impossible.

Now, let me also say that our availability doesn’t guarantee God will do what we want or what we think should happen. Sometimes we get confused about that. We’ve made ourselves as available as we can be; why isn’t God doing what we think ought to or needs to happen? Our availability is for God to do what he needs to do through and in us. Sometimes the work that most needs to happen is a transformation in us, and sometimes he needs us to do something in the world for his sake through us. Our availability is about God, not about us.

Mary was humble and Mary was available. Mary was also full of faith. I’m not talking about believing the right doctrine, or being able to say a creed or recite a few Bible verses. I’m not even talking about showing up at church and sitting in your pew. True faith is an active thing; we really only believe what we live out. Mary could have said, “Oh, I believe in that Messiah thing, but I really don’t want to get too involved. Isn’t there someone else you could ask?” She knew how her world would treat an unmarried pregnant woman; she’d probably seen it happen before. And yet she had faith that God would take care of her and that faith turned into action: carrying and giving birth to the Son of God. This was not a short-term commitment. This was motherhood, a life-long journey, and for Mary it would even involve watching her son die on a cross. Some have described her as the first disciple, the first one to put her faith in Christ—here, at the outset, even before he was born, long before she knew what that meant. She heard the angel’s words: “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end” (1:31-33). An impossible task. How could she begin to explain to anyone else what had really happened to her? Even if she tried, who would believe her? Mary simply trusted that God would take care of her. Her faith would sustain her in Nazareth. It would sustain her at a manger in Bethlehem. It would sustain her in Jerusalem at the foot of a cross. Ultimately, her faith would see her through all the way to the empty tomb and beyond.

Humility, availability, and faith. God grows these things in us so that he can work miracle transformations in us. God called Mary to do something that would literally change the world forever. I believe God calls all of us to do things that will change the world we live in. Mother Teresa said, “Few of us are called to do great things. But we can all do ordinary things with great love” (Pastor’s Manual, pg. B115). Things like buying a turkey for a family who is struggling to make ends meet. Complimenting a child for a job well-done. Sharing kindness with strangers. Demonstrating a thankfulness for life. Those are things Scrooge does near the end of Dickens’ story. Scrooge says, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, Present, and Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” At the end of the book, it is said of Scrooge that he learned to keep Christmas well, not by hiding from it, but by daily living out the message of the manger in humility, availability, and faith.

How will you “keep Christmas well”? How will you live your transformation from humbug to hallelujah? Perhaps tomorrow, Christmas Day, it would do us all good to take some time and look back over the last year to see what God has done in our lives. What are the miracles, big and small, that have happened to you, to those you love? Take some time to remember how God has shown up in your life, in ways both big and small. Then, when someone asks you how your Christmas was, be ready to tell them. Share the good things God has done in your life. God is in the transformation business, and you never know—he just might use your joy to transform someone else’s life.

I’ve mentioned ringing bells for the Salvation Army several times; it’s a thing I started with my kids many years ago, though I usually do it by myself these days. One time, several years ago, Rachel and I were ringing bells in the bitter cold. (By the way, I’m extremely thankful for our local Kroger that lets us ring inside the entryway. Not every business allows that.) In this particular location, I’ll never forget it, one woman came out of the store and, without even looking at us, said, quite loudly, “You all are absolutely nuts, completely insane!” And I’m pretty sure she believed that. I wished her “Merry Christmas,” and as she went on to her car, I thought about why we were out there at all. I realized we do what we do out of gratitude, not to win friends or impress people. We do such things because of all that Christ has done for us. We do what we do because the baby of Bethlehem has made us new. That’s what Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). This Christmas, may that be our prayer and hope as well: that everything old in our lives will pass away, and all that will be left is the new thing God wants to do in us. Let us keep Christmas well, all the year. He is born! He is here! Let’s celebrate His presence!