11/30/52

Scripture: Isaiah 7: 1-17

Text: Isaiah 7: 14b. “Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”

Everyone is preparing for Christmas, or will be. We barely finish a Thanksgiving dinner before we open all stops on the American organ and play “Christmas” with a crescendo from forte to triple forte.

Indeed, preparations begin much earlier than Thanksgiving. The shops and department stores ordered, long ago, the merchandise that is for sale now in every part of the land. And factories were hard at work on it long before the wholesale and retail orders came in. Much of that kind of preparation began with Thanksgiving time, 1951! The manufacturers of Christmas cards were hard at work on the second of January, 1952. Many toy concerns had their toy show for the Christmas trade last June. The chances are that you thought last summer, perhaps while on a vacation trip, of a Christmas gift you wanted then to make, or purchase and lay away, until now.

Even the festive greens of some communities have been put up well before Thanksgiving day. I have seen them up as early as November 14th in this state.

Plans are completed early, and announcement made, for the arrival of Santa Claus in some places immediately after Thanksgiving. And the old fellow will invite a deluge of requests between now and December 24th.

Some individual families begin Christmas pretty early. I read of a household of a generation ago, in which preparations began in October with children cracking the nuts and cutting the fruit to go in the fruit cake which they wanted for Thanksgiving as well as for Christmas. Next, they brewed a drink, which was a kind of home-made root beer, prepared in a big aluminum kettle. Then there were Christmas breads and cookies to be baked. And a high point in the preparation was the making of what they called “the curve.” Chopped beef and pork were put in a wooden bowl. Then the end of a cow horn was fitted in a casing, and the curve was stuffed, through that horn, until it was as round as the pillow-stuffed middle of Santa Claus. There were other preparations in that family, as there are in many families of this generation.

But though they be religious families -- and over half of the families of this nation are actively connected with some church -- is there a religious preparation comparable to all this planning for what is festive?

Now I know that some of our Protestant forbears put a ban on Christmas altogether. As part of their departure from the errors and excesses of the established church of their time, they decided that Christmas had a significance that was spiritually pagan and that it had no place in the better world they were trying to create for themselves and their children. Anyone who was reported to be celebrating Christmas at all, in any way, or who abstained from work on the traditional day of Christmas, was subject to no gentle punishment! Disapproval was pointed and fines were heavy.

However, their time and practice is quite evidently not our time and practice. We celebrate Christmas with the enthusiasm characteristic of Americans. But we do well to question whether the festive side of the season outweighs the spiritual significance of the occasion.

If we are going to continue making Christmas such a season of decorations and dinners, gifts and greetings and gaiety (and I doubt not that we shall!) let us give more earnest consideration to its religious phase. For the birth of Christ should not be pushed aside to make room for holidays of pagan materialism. We should prepare for Christmas in a spiritual way.

There is a drive from some quarters to put the “Christ” back in “Christmas.” All people are asked to spell out the full word “Christmas” rather than using the lazy abbreviation, “Xmas”. Homes and stores are asked to display nativity scenes, along with all of the Christmas trees, Santas, bells, gifts, lights and so on. These reminders are good insofar as they suggest restraint and respect. And perhaps they suggest that there is something essential to Christmas without which the “festive” alone is harmfully empty.

The department of evangelism of our National Council of Churches has been driving for a more religious observance of Christmas. In some localities, they reason with the commercial interests against the tendency to start Christmas shopping campaigns long before Thanksgiving -- as early, in some cases, as the second week of November. In all communities they urge people to abandon the excesses which lead to scandalous drunkenness in home, or office or hotel. And they call attention of churches and Christian homes to the possibilities of choosing those activities and attitudes that put Christ central in the experience of Christmas.

Those churches which observe a liturgical year refer to the season, which begins with today, as “Advent” -- or the season that leads up to the appearance of Christ on earth; the birth of Jesus. As a required pattern of observance, “Advent” could become stiff. But as a time for spiritual perception and activity it can be filled with in-coming, and out-reaching, blessedness.

I am glad when our church choir includes anthems of an advent nature during this month or six-weeks period. It is a joy to begin in December the congregational singing of the Christmas hymns and carols. But of course these will be heard on radio and in stores as well. And there will be the great Christmas community sing in the Field House 2 weeks from today.

Can we plan further for Christmas in a way that might make us aware of the coming of our Lord, and the tremendous significance of his presence in our lives? Let us plan for Christmas not only in a material way, but in a spiritual way. And I do not mean by increased activity, more pageants, and so on, but by attitude, by the recognition and remembrance that will put Christian content into our actions -- the kind that makes G.I.s anxious to bring happiness to the orphaned kids they see; the kind that makes one want, above all else, to build peace among people; the kind that brings sheer joy for the greatest gift of all -- that of a savior for us and for all mankind. The kind that may send a gift to someone who is quite unable to send any reciprocal gift.

We can remember that Christmas was prepared for centuries before it came. In 722 B.C., the prophet Isaiah told forth the saying: “Behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel,” which means “God with us.” Words of one language are often difficult to translate precisely into those of another tongue. The word here translated “young woman” in the R. S. V. is also translated virgin in some versions, and the latter translation is still given as an alternative in a footnote of the R.S.V. There are those who maintain that the Christian religion rests on miracle, and that it is absolutely essential to salvation to maintain that the words here used must emphasize the miraculous and that they are a prediction of the birth of Jesus. This is by no means clear in a careful reading of the context. In fact some conscientious Christians doubt that interpretation.

What is clear, I think, is that prophecy is a far greater concept than just prediction. Prophecy is an awareness of the righteousness of God, and a proclamation of man’s unalterable necessity to learn and perform the spiritual purposes of God. And as for miracles, the greatest miracle before man’s finite understanding is that there should have appeared at all on earth a life of such grandeur and spiritual perfection as that of our Lord.

But this portion of one verse of the prophecy of Isaiah is so much a part of the tradition of Christmas that we may well use it as a reminder that God was preparing Christmas in the aching, fearful, hopeful hearts of mankind for ages before that advent.

Actually the stage was being set for Christmas long before Isaiah. The cosmic preparation was begun in the creative process described by both science and the Bible as the beginning of the world. When life finally appeared on the cooling, hardening crust of this fresh-formed earth, where was it all going? To what was it heading? It was a part of the preparation for Bethlehem and the manger.

There was not alone a cosmic preparation, but there was a geographical preparation for Christmas. If you had been directing the drama, where would you have had the Christ-child born? In an up-to-date hotel? In a palace? In a church chancel where so often it is now depicted? In a guest room? In a capital city? In your own country? In a modern hospital? Where?

In the fullness of God’s design Jesus was born not in Rome, nor Jerusalem; not in a palace, a temple, nor even a hotel; not in the most powerful nation on earth; but in a barn -- an animal stable -- in a wee village, of a small, subject nation; amongst a people oft times spiritually sensitive and sometimes callous; into a nation of folk one day to be dispersed to the ends of the earth and sometimes hated by the rest of mankind.

Jesus was born in a country smaller in area than the state of Vermont; but it was a cross road of an ancient world. Caravan tracks led across it to the capitals of great nations. Sailors would put small barks out from Tyre and Sidon to the distant parts of the Mediterranean. Ideas met and clashed, or were exchanged, in this little country.

Likewise there was the historical preparation for Christ’s birth. God chose a people who would write the story of His dealings with His creatures with their own words and lives. Whether the people of Israel were more noble, more religious or greater than His other children is perhaps beside the point. Someone had to write, in memorable words, on the horizons of history, the record that could be read by all ages of the ways of faith and life.

The Roman Empire would begin its march through history. Roads would be built to allow the marching of troops and the movement of commerce. And along these roads would eventually go the messengers of spiritual good news.

And there were searching spiritual preparations, for the birth of the Christ-child, so that the hearts of mankind might earnestly yearn for the truth. The ancient gods of Greek mythology had to die in men’s minds. New understanding of truth had to come. It still must come. We are observing, both the willful perversion and selfish disregard of truth in our time, in the ambition for privilege and power.

The mass of gas whirling in space until the earth took form among the other planets of the heavens, the march of nations through history, the stamping out of trade routes in Palestine, the people chosen of God -- all these point toward Christmas, toward a baby’s cry, the tender smile of the mother, and the song of hosts who understood that the zero hour of history had come. It was as though the stars in their courses moved that night to herald that birth. With such cosmic preparation, surely we ought to prepare ourselves, in our little yet fateful days, for the real meaning of Christmas.

Don’t let the urgency of getting out those Christmas cards keep you from a Sabbath worship in his church. That is surrender of a great freedom to a kind of social slavery.

Take the wrappings off the day and behold what it is in reality. Take time and attention for the vision that it is the story of God’s love for us, and His demand that we give that love others in turn. Recall that the light over the manger is already the likeness of a cross. For without the cross, the manger would long since have been forgotten. Without calvary, we should scarce have heard of Bethlehem!

We can prepare ourselves for Christmas with a long, earnest look into that manger, seeing there not only tenderness, and tiny hands, but a life that became such magnificent manhood as to be an eternal judgment upon all our doings and purposes. Out of that newborn helplessness came the enduring strength that sent men of devotion through trackless jungles, into mortal perils, and against the designs of evil rulers.

Those tiny fingers became the hands that blessed and healed and renewed. Those feet became the means of carrying a body beyond the breaking point to find that which was lost, to forgive that which was outcast and hated.

Think of the real Christmas. Thank God for it. For so long as we have it we are not lost.

Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift!

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, November 30, 1952

Wisconsin Rapids, November 27, 1955