The decorations and carols and door buster sales start earlier every year. This time I felt like the school supplies disappeared and were quickly replaced with stockings, ornaments, and fake evergreen trees.
I love Christmas. I love shopping for presents, wrapping them up, and hoping desperately that I chose the right thing. I love baking dozens of cookies and delivering them in the cold mid-winter. I love putting up our tree each year and adding to our ornament collection. I love “rocking out” to Christmas music on the way home from parties and watching my husband play the air-keyboard.
Somehow, each year, I manage to do something to the tree. Even though it didn’t fall over in the middle of the night, this year I filled the tree stand all the way up with water only to realize that the outside ring wasn’t the basin after all. At least our floor needed a good mopping.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about the rhetoric of Christmas. I love the decorations and cookies and presents and memories we hope will last forever. But what does this season say? What does it mean? Is it convincing and life-altering, or does it just slip in and out with the calendar year?
For me, the rhetoric of Christmas is found in the Book of Isaiah:
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
(Isaiah 9:2, 6)
I was that person walking in darkness, walking in the shadow of death. And behold — a Great Light dawned. Jesus, the Son of God, came into the world as a baby to rescue me from my sin.
He could have come as a conquering King, with great shouts and loud trumpets. He could have announced to the world that the long awaited Messiah had arrived. But no, he came as a humble Servant, meek and lowly, full of humility and dependence on His Father.
This tiny baby was Immanuel, God with Us. He came to seek and to save the lost… we who were lost in our sin and pride and foolish self-dependence. He came for us. He died for us. And He lives for us.
I’m humbled and I’m thankful.
