I'm going to tell you a little secret: Christmas isn't always the most wonderful time of the year for ministers. It may have something to do with having to write two extra sermons (in combination with New Year's Eve) while your house is full of family. Or people asking you, "So, are you enjoying the holiday? What are you doing with your time off?" (Yeah ... right). These things are seasonal irritants but what really wears on preachers is the pressure of what to preach on Christmas Day. And that may have something to do with you, dear reader.

Sermon Expectations⤒🔗

Consider for a moment: what text do you want your minister to preach on this Christmas? What are your expectations? If he doesn't preach on the birth narrative found in the gospels, will you be disappointed? Will you complain, "That wasn't a Christmas sermon! He hardly spoke of Jesus' birth and never mentioned Mary or Joseph!"? If he selects a text from one of Paul's letters or dares to preach out of the Old Testament, will you be offended and resentful?

These feelings run strong in certain folks and the message gets through to the minister. Grumbling and discontent has a way of foaming up to the surface ­through the comments at home visits or perhaps directly to the minister. The end result is that the pastor becomes dismayed as Advent approaches and Christmas Day in particular. Once bitten, twice shy. I know ministers who've tried to preach from a "non-traditional" Christmas text and have been so burned by criticism that they have made it a standard practice to always end up in Luke 2 on Christmas Day!

Pressure-Cooker←⤒🔗

It's remarkable that this same sort of pressure does not occur (at least, I have not heard of it) for the other special days on which we commemorate the saving work of Christ. On Good Friday and Easter, everyone expects to hear a sermon about these salvation events but the preacher feels free to choose from a variety of texts. Approaching those topics either from the expectation setting of the Old Testament or the fulfillment context of the New Testament are both acceptable and appreciated. Preachers can breathe easy on these occasions: no one waiting to speak to you after church and no stinging texts on your cell phone (whew!).

Same goes for Ascension Day and Pentecost Sunday. Most church members don't care where in Scripture the text is chosen from so long as there is a rich exposition and application of those particular works of God. But on Christmas Day, if the preacher is not busy in one of the four gospels, then look-out! Stony stares, corrosive comments, and testy tweets to follow. As the kids say: what a fail!

Sentimentality←⤒🔗

Where does this pressure come from I think it comes from the general spirit of sentimentality that exists throughout our society at Christmas-time. Sentimentality means to emphasize emotion and concentrate on how things make you feel over above anything else — like logic, reason, or even God's revelation. Your feelings become the most important. You want to feel good, be on an emotional high. And our culture excels at exalting the feeling of the "Christmas season."

It does this in many ways. The day after Halloween, every department store redecorates with Santa-flavoured themes. Shortly afterward begins the endless Christmas ditties on the overhead speakers. By December, the radio stations, even the rock and pop stations, will haul out the "Christmas classics" of years gone by — I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas; It's Christmas, Baby, Please Come Home. You can even hear Bruce Springsteen belting out, Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

This is all just a warm-up. In the final two or three weeks leading up to December 25, all the Christmas movies will get played — you can watch one every night of the week, it seems! Towns and cities decorate with lights and tinsel and Christmas trees. There is Christmas baking, eggnog, and a hankering to be with loved ones. You'll even still see nativity scenes — especially in front of churches. The message of being kind and loving, extraordinarily nice even to strangers is promoted everywhere. People talk about the "miracle of Christmas time." Everything is orchestrated to produce a special feeling.

The Baby Jesus is granted a place in all of this. Christmas is acknowledged to be his "birthday" and the goodness of God in giving Mary a healthy baby in such poor circumstances is acknowledged. The presence of angels, shepherds, and animals looking on the scene in the stable is touching. And that's just the point: our culture focuses on the feeling that Jesus' birth brings but leaves aside any reference as to the purpose of his coming! Man's sin and rebellion is left aside. Justice, holy wrath, punishment, and hell are forbidden concepts on December 25. In the world's Christmas, Baby Jesus shows up in the manger every year to warm your heart but he never makes it to the cross to save your soul!

Other Christian Days←⤒🔗

Compare this to the way our western society handles the other major saving works of Christ. It ignores his Ascension and Pentecost entirely. You can hardly find a calendar which marks these days. The world turns Easter into a hunt for coloured eggs and eating silly chocolate bunnies. Good Friday for most is just a good excuse to have a day off with little cultural baggage attached. The way our culture handles these events is so far removed from scriptural teaching and Christian belief that we don't get them mixed up (usually). Hence, there is little pressure from outside to make these events all about the good emotions we can get out of them. For that alone, we can thank God.

Sweet Emotions←⤒🔗

Now, before I get accused of having no heart and no feeling at all, let me hasten to say that Christmas (like the other feast days) should bring out a great deal of emotion within us Christians! I like Christmas baking, enjoy eggnog, and treasure time with loved ones — these are good gifts from our heavenly Father. I don't even object to tasteful, true-to-the-Bible nativity scenes which stir our hearts. But our hearts should be stirred and our emotions should be produced in us by the gospel of Jesus Christ, not by an invented, artificial and nebulous "spirit of the season!" Our great appreciation for Christmas should not find its source in the trappings and peripheral events but in the Christ who was born!

We should be deeply humbled by the news that the Son of God took upon himself weak human flesh to become a human being. Let wonder fill our hearts that this glorious God was born a child, like any other child (though still God), and let himself be raised in obscurity by sinful parents! We ought to break forth in joyful song that Jesus Christ did this in order to stand in our place as the Last Adam! It should overwhelm us that our Saviour took upon himself every moment of his earthly life our curse, our punishment due to our sin! We should be intensely impressed that Christmas leads directly to the cross — it is why he came!

Naturally, this news evokes emotions within believers, true and sweet emotion, but then this gospel should be our focus throughout the time of Advent and on Christmas Day.

A Bible Full←⤒🔗

And if it is, then let your minister preach freely from any text in the Bible that speaks to the gospel of Christmas. It is simply not true that the Christmas message is limited to the four gospels or that only Luke 2 and Matthew 2 are worthy of Christmas Day sermons. Christmas Day is a celebration of the incarnation of the Son of God and that event has many, many angles to it! Why did he come? What specific task(s) did he come to perform? What roles or offices was he born to fulfill? How is it that by taking on human nature the Son of God was actually working to save us from sin and damnation? These truths have many different facets, like a priceless diamond, and are taught throughout Scripture in many different contexts.

You can even find Christmas themes in the Pentateuch! Genesis through Deuteronomy may seem far-removed from Jesus' birth in Bethlehem but the message of his future birth and work is found there. It comes in different forms — like promises or prophecies, figures or events which foreshadow the birth of Christ and his work, or laws and ceremonies which outline the need for and expectation of a Messiah. To show some examples of this, for this issue of Clarion we asked five ministers to each write one Christmas meditation on a passage in one of the five Books of Moses — and each was able to (and we think they did a fine job too). They could just as well have been asked to choose five different texts from the Psalms or the Prophets or even the more historical books. The point now is: a lot can be learned about the incarnation of God's Son from non-traditional Christmas texts from all over Scripture!

A Rich Gospel←⤒🔗

If your minister has the feeling from his congregation that he must preach out of gospels on Christmas Day each year and every year, both he and you are missing out. The good news of the incarnation is a miraculous event that God has carefully and painstakingly, over the course of hundreds of years, revealed many things about in the Old Testament. Glimpses, flashes, shadows, expectations are laid out in many Old Testament passages and with the light we now have from the New Testament, we can look back and perceive these silhouettes of Christ with much greater clarity and precision! This adds to our Christmas wonder and sweet gospel emotion!

On top of this, the Holy Spirit has inspired much reflection on Christ's birth by the apostles and other New Testament writers. Think of well-known passages like Philippians 2:5-11 or Hebrews 2 which speak explicitly and quite movingly of Christ's coming into the world. But there are other, lesser-known passages which give insight into the meaning of Christmas. Check out, for example, John 18:3 (in the middle of Christ's trial!); Romans 1:3; Galatians 4:4ff; 1 Timothy 1:15; Hebrews 9:11; 10:5; 1 John 5:6; and Revelation 12:4-5 to name a few. Because the gospel is so rich, so multi-layered and variegated, wouldn't we all benefit if, over the course of the years, our ministers worked with the whole revelation of Christ's incarnation and didn't limit themselves to re-runs of traditional texts?

This Christmas, give your minister a gift: freedom to preach on the first Advent of Christ from anywhere in the Bible. That's a gift that will keep on giving.