A Christmas of Praise

How to respond

I love Christmas Day. It’s a day unlike every other day.

It usually has this almost paradoxical feel of being both highly stressed and totally relaxed.

It’s a time of great joy, but also a time where the pain of loss can be keenly felt.

We give gifts, and we receive gifts.

Sometimes those gifts hit the right spot. They’re thoughtful. They’re generous. They’re something really useful.

Sometimes the gifts we give and receive miss the mark. The receiver looks at it and thinks - now what in the world am I going to do with this?

This morning, as I give some brief reflections about the Christmas story, the aspect I want to think about is how do we respond to it all?

How do we respond when we get the good gift? But also how do we respond when we get a bad gift?

How do we respond when lunch goes well? But also how do we respond when our family gathering becomes a disaster?

Well, how we actually respond to these events, might depend on our emotional state, and you know what, within reason, it’s ok to allow your emotions to come to the surface.

But yet there can be a deeper response. One that should dwell deep within us and bubble through all the other feelings we might have - it’s a response that should be at the heart of all believers.

Well, I’m going to look at particular response we get on numerous occasions in the Christmas story, but I want to think about these response in the cultural context of the time.

Jewish Context

Now, I think the reality is, we often don’t really think about what life is like when Jesus was born.

Often what seems to get pictured is that it was a simpler time with not much happening.

I suspect for many of us, we don’t really know much about what happens when the Old Testament ends and the New Testament begins. They sometimes call this period the silent years. But this has the unfortunate implication that we think that not much has happened.

The reality, however, is that a lot has happened.

Now I don’t think you want me taking up your Christmas Day by going through a long history lesson of what happened between the Old and New Tesatement, so let me just give you this highlights.

The Old Testament essentially ends with the Jews returning back to the land following their period of exile.

Well, when they returned, they never really had much power.

First the Persians held the power. Then the Greeks came and they held the power.

At differing points, the Jews have different levels of freedom. Until we get to a point when the Jews are really being oppressed.

Well, the Jews fight back in what is called the Maccabean Revolt. And guess what? It actually worked. The Jews still remember this victory in the festival of Hanukkah.

Things weren’t ideal, but the Jews at least had a level of autonomy over the way they did things.

That is, until King Herod the Great rolled in with the support of the Romans. This actually made for a quite unusual situation, particular given that Herod himself identified as a Jew, although you’d be right to question his religious convictions.

By the time Jesus is born, we’re only a short time before Herod’s eventual death.

This period would have been marked with frustration from the Jews. They had their autonomy in their grasps, but it’s taken by someone who, though sympathizes with them, is challenged by his allegiance to Rome.

Now the reason I’ve done this quick history lesson is because I want to show that when we see the way people respond, it’s not because it was just a simple time.

It was a messy situation with lots of political tensions. While very different in the specifics to ours, it shows that we can’t just hide behind the complexities of our own time.

You see, they would have felt so close to things going well, only to watch things start heading in the wrong direction.

But it’s in this background that our stories comes.

Census

In fact, Luke 2 starts with Rome issuing a decree for a census to be taken. Right there, the Jews would all have been reminded of this delicate political situation. They don’t really have autonomy. They are under Rome.

And so, Joseph finds himself in a really awkward situation.

First, he’s got the complexities surrounding the woman he’s pledged to be married to being pregnant with the Son of God - I’m not quite sure how you process that one.

But now, because Rome wants to throw it’s weight around, he’s left with a situation where he needs to take his heavily pregnant wife to another town to be registered. You can’t imagine he would be one happy man at this point.

Finally they get to Bethlehem, and the baby comes, but of course, when things are going bad, they usually keep going bad, and so he finds himself in a place where there is no guest room, and so the new baby finds himself in a manger.

Well, forget the political context, if something like this happened to you, I think you would be in your rights to have a whinge about it.

Well, Luke never tells us how Joseph responds to all of this, but we’ll soon see Mary’s response.

But meanwhile, Luke does a quick scene change, where we will see the first response I want to highlight.

The Shepherds

Luke takes us out of town to a near by field where we have some shepherds looking after their sheep.

It is there that an Angel of the Lord appears to these shepherds. They get the first message that the Messiah has been born.

The shepherds of course, are a very strange choice. They are not the soft cuddly types that usually get depicted in most accounts. They would have rather been rough men that most people would have been highly suspicious of.

For the Jews who were frustrated with the political situation, they would never have imagined that it would have been shepherds who first got told that the Messiah was born. But then again, for most Jews, there are going to be a lot of things that they find surprising in this Messiah.

But for the shepherds, they are about to witness the first of the responses that I want to highlight this morning - and that is the heavenly response.

The Angels

In verse 13, we’re told that “suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God...”

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine seeing a whole host of heavenly beings just praising God?

This must have been one of the most surreal moments for these shepherds.

The angels sing: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests”.

The angels respond to the birth of Jesus with praise and declaring God’s glory everywhere.

Now it’s worth pointing out, that from a worldly perspective, not much actually changes with the birth of Jesus.

That political tension remains. In fact, we’ll see when we get to the ministry of Jesus, that the political tension gets even worse.

So when we think of it from within the cultural context, we can wonder, does God really get glory, and is peace really going to be seen on Earth?

The shepherds praise

Well, hold on to that question, because we then see the shepherds actually going to Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus.

And from a worldly perspective, their reaction is strange. They would have just seen a baby in what would have been a awkward situation being in the manger.

You could excuse them if their reaction was one of bemusement. But it wasn’t. They saw the child, and they just had to tell others.

As they left, we’re told in verse 20 that they returned “glorifying and praising God”.

It’s the same response as the angels.

So let me come back to the question I asked of the angels...

The world’s in a bit of a mess. The world continues to be in a mess. The only thing that’s changed from a worldly perspective is that a baby has now been born in rather unusual circumstances. What is there to glorify and praise God about?

God on the move

Well, the answer is that the angels were privy to some information which they had passed on to the shepherds.

And if I can paraphrase what that information is: God is on the move!

God has not forgotten them. God cares about their plight. And God is going to make a change.

This is why the angels and the shepherds gave glory to God and sang his praises.

But we could ask: why doesn’t God move quicker? Why can’t he just make everything right just now?

Well, in some ways, I want to suggest that the answer to that comes in this story. You see, the fact that Jesus came as a human, and all that comes with that (including child birth), he’s showing that he wants to make this change with us - in a close relationship with us.

God is not slow in making changes because of any lack of ability, rather he does things in his own perfect timing because it allows him to maximize his relationship with us.

And this is further reason to glorify and praise him.

Application

So what should our response to Christmas be?

Well, here’s the thing. Whether today turns out to be your favourite Christmas ever, or whether it’s your most forgettable one yet, you have reason to glorify and praise God.

Because you know something which far outweighs the events. You know that God wants to have a relationship with you and he is on the move!

And so we praise God. We can join with Job when he said in his distress: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, may the name of the Lord be praised”.

Like the shepherds in the Christmas story - we can tells other about the good news.

We can give God glory by declaring the truths of his Word.

Mary’s response

Before I wrap things up this morning, let me just very briefly touch on Mary’s response which we get in verse 19. Here we read: “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart”.

Praise and glory are certainly the necessary response for the Christian at Christmas, however, let me suggest that it is also very good to be reflective about what God is doing. It is often in these careful reflections that we truly get to the point where we can glorify and praise God.

Conclusion

We have now gone for two years where our world has stumbled through a pandemic that has been distressing for many. And for a lot of people, this will have implication on their Christmas celebrations this year.

But we can glorify and praise God because God is on the move. He has not forgotten you. He cares about your plight. And he is making changes.

Let me pray...