Sermon Tone Analysis
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The Perfect Christmas Present
For those of you who are doing some last minute Christmas shopping: I have the following tips.
What makes a perfect Christmas present?
Planned.
Something grabbed from the gas station counter on the way over?
Generally, not great.
Personal.
It is for them.
It reflects what they need.
Permanent.
Something that lasts.
The proverbial “gift that keeps on giving”.
If you can get 2 out of 3, that’s a great gift.
If you can get all 3… that’s amazing.
In 1995 I gave the perfect Christmas present to Jono.
Months earlier I had purchased a large box full of popsicle sticks.
Thousands of popsicle sticks in one box.
I was into making these exploding ninja stars with them and figured it would be awesome for all sorts of activities.
They sat in that box for months.
There was another thing I had that Jono was always jealous of.
I had a CD Walkman and a CD collection.
Top notch stuff: Boys2Men, Carmen, Michael W. Smith.
Jono didn’t have a CD player, but his stereo did have a tape player.
So, over the course of several weeks, I secretly made (bootleg) copies of all my CDs onto tapes.
I had the technology.
Then I dumped out all the popsicle sticks from the box, stacked the tapes inside, and covered them with popsicle sticks.
When Jono opened his Christmas gift, all excited, you never saw an 11 year-old look quite so disappointed.
Oh… my big brother got me…?
Popsicle sticks.
The same ones he had thought I was dumb for buying in the first place.
“Look inside!” my Mom said.
“I know what it is...”
“Look inside!”
He looks inside.
What does he see?
More popsicle sticks.
Bwah ha ha!
“Look underneath the popsicle sticks!”
And he finds the tapes.
The perfect Christmas Gift.
It was planned, it took me weeks recording and labeling each tape.
You had to do that in real time one album at a time.
It was personal.
This was hand-crafted for him.
And it was permanent.
He still has those tapes and plays them every day!
(Okay, 2 out of 3 isn’t bad).
Full confession, I think he wasn’t much more excited about the tapes than he was about the Popsicle sticks.
Wah wah.
Planned, personal… and not so permanent.
Almost perfect.
That’s why this year, I’ll be getting Jono “nothing”.
It’s planned (I’ve been planning on getting him nothing for quite some time).
It’s personal (It’s exactly what he asked for and exactly what he deserves!).
And permanent: he will have that nothing I gave him forever.
Where was I going?
Ah yes, Christmas.
We all know Christmas is not about presents!
Christmas is about Jesus!
So what do we learn about Jesus during this Christmas season?
If you were to build a theology of Jesus just from our Christmas music, what would you get?
Creepy Jesus Baby
There are a few songs that build this picture of Jesus.
Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin, Mother, Mother and Child
Holy infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace
Why is Jesus so quiet?
Because he is so holy and perfect.
He isn’t baby-like at all, he is Jesus-baby.
In a song I heard recently, right in the middle of an otherwise great song, there is this “Christmas” language
You draw the hearts of shepherds
You draw the hearts of kings
Even as a baby, You were changing everything
You called me to Your Kingdom
Before Your lips could speak
And even as a baby, You were reaching out for me
Now, I fully realize I am being too critical and too literal here.
But… this is a bit creepy to me.
Creepy Jesus Baby
Picture baby Jesus reaching out for you, right now.
Now give him divine infinite knowledge, he can’t speak, but you can see the wisdom of ages in his eyes.
And he is reaching out for you...
That isn’t incarnation.
That’s more like a creepy puppet baby played by God.
Jesus didn’t come as a creepy God-baby, a human puppet controlled by a God-spirit.
That is a heresy: either Docetism (Jesus just appeared to be human) or Apollinarianism (Jesus did not have a human mind).
He enters fully into the human experience, becoming everything that a human baby is.
Jesus is fully God… but he is fully man.
He enters into the full human experience, from conception to birth to adolescence to adulthood to death.
All of that helplessness and all of that messiness.
All of the noise and all of the chaos.
He is born in humility, born into family.
My favorite picture, I have shared this before, is that “stables” at the time were usually just the family room of the house, the animals brought in for warmth.
Why?
Why did Jesus come the way he did?
At the time he did?
He could have come like an angel from on high.
“Fear not, I am Jesus...” and start teaching and leading.
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