Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you? 2 Cor. 13:5
We are among millions preparing to observe, or celebrate Christmas. How will it be done? With embellishments, or in essence? Let’s consult the dictionary.
“Embellishment” is defined as ‘to improve or beautify by adding detail or an ornament, adorn to make more interesting by adding detail’. “Essence” is ‘the characteristic or intrinsic nature of a thing which determines its identity and fundamental nature. The most distinctive element. A perfect or complete form of something especially a person who typifies an abstract quality. The unchanging nature of something as opposed to its attributes and existence.
Which of these definitions do you think more accurately complies with the story of Christmas? I think it is a most wondrous season. What do we need to celebrate? I am not a miserable party spoiler, or kill joy. This is not a call to cancel preparations, or leave all the decorations in the cardboard box – It’s a call to look for the essence where Christ is hiding. It’s a call to the poorest and loneliest, who have nothing in the cupboard with which to celebrate, to look within and receive the best Christmas gift of Christ himself.
In our preparations and to our expense we easily get sucked in to the embellishments. Leaflets are dropped at the door, or included in the Weekend papers, or splashed in the magazines using persuasive language and detailed illustrations to ‘save by buying’ – a contradiction! Our hyper and supermarkets resound to carols in the impersonal material retail surroundings where aisle and window are stashed with tempting offers from whiskey to washing machines, perfume to plum pudding, toys to tool kits, fruit to films – all offered as a means of ‘celebrating’ Christmas. These festive ornamentations are not wrong, but simply misleading for buried beneath the dazzling extravagant decorative embellishments lies the One whose special occasion it is.
The church has not remained an impervious spectator, but has sanitized some activities; parties, presents, lights, trees, mistletoe, hats, crackers, nativity scenes; and glamourized some procedures, plays, elaborate rituals, richly ornamented vestments all very far removed from the muck, odour and plaster of the stable where Mary bled and pushed and the great miracle of light burst into the world. It is here, when the umbilical cord is cut, we find the “essence” of Christmas, the unique One, lying in straw wrapped in rags. Every birth is a miracle. Most gynecologists and senior medics would agree. Male members who have not been present at the birth of their child, watched the contractions of their wife’s belly, heard the anguished exertions and straining, or screams of pain do not register the cost to the woman giving birth. Neither are any of us able to realize the mystery of how the infinite, incomprehensible Creator of the universe floated into the embryonic fluid embedded himself into the wall of Mary’s womb, squeezed through the birth canal, in the warm blood smeared face of a new born baby into a world of matter, growth, temptation, suffering and death. This is the moment all embellishments crumple, falling to shreds bereft of any significance before the eternal One in human form.
History, biology, pregnancy culminate in a special birthday and we normally expect to see and focus our attention on the person whose birthday it is. So set aside the distractions of embellishments to see the true wonder. Artists, sculptors, have attempted to portray the world-shaking happening, but none have been able to penetrate the sheer impenetrable mystery of the divine disclosure. Poets and mystics use words which indicate, fascinate, stimulate our imagination but then fall short pointing to a glory beyond our reach. ‘Our God, contracted to a span. Incomprehensibly made man’. A divine human sharing, or oneness which can happen in us now.
We sing ‘Be born in us today’ – Christmas is Christ born in us. ‘God born in the human soul’. The mystery of the incarnation is God hiding in us. As one writer said ‘We find God by looking within, and find our true selves’. Another wrote ‘The center of our being has always been the doorway connecting us with God’. ‘He wrapped him in our clay; Unmarked by human eye, The latent Godhead lay’. How material is that! God in the human person. The one in ordinary clothing who I see in church, meet in the shopping mall, at the cash counter, sit next to on the bus, see at the petrol station, or tax office. God in the natural surroundings of garden and sea shore, park and woodland, mountain and creature. All are a revelation, of God’s endless, unfolding incarnational presence within yet all around us.
The essence of Christmas is God in us. That’s what he came to do. The best gift is God himself. If you’re poor he is at your table. If you’re lonely he is at your side. ‘Blessed Saviour, Christ most holy, In a manger thou didst rest; Canst thou stoop again, yet lower, And abide within my breast? Enter, then, O Christ most holy, Make a Christmas in my heart; make a heaven of my manger: It is heaven where thou art’.