Creekside Church Sermon of December 22, 2002 "Christmas: For Children Only" Luke 1:26-38	Rev. David Bibbee
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The psychologist panelist said something to a caller that rubbed me the wrong way. She said that one way to defuse the tension that arises when extended families are together is to keep the focus where it should be…on the children. "As we know," she said, "Christmas is for children." "Here we go again, " I said to myself. "Another dose of secular drivel telling us that Christmas amounts to little more than a holiday for kids, and the least we can do is put our problems and grievances aside so they can have a good time." Another example of what the world has done to Christmas.

Then again, maybe it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's good to let the kids be kids for a change instead of hurrying them into adulthood, teaching them to act like little adults long before they are ready. Give them a break from the way we have overscheduled them and given them an adult dose of stress at an early age. Let's fix our focus on the children. That way we won't have to search our own souls and unnecessarily burden ourselves with what life would be like if Christ were born anew in each of us.

But I'd better be careful. It's easy for pastors to get cynical this. Maybe there is something to be said about Christmas being biased toward children. Maybe we should set aside our grown-up perspectives and theological sophistication, be brought down to size, and "not" act our age for a change.

Each Christmas, Nat King Cole sings to us, "And so I'm offering this simple phrase, to kids from one to ninety-two, although it's been said, many times, many ways, Merry Christmas to you." Christmas brings out the child in us. It takes us back to the time before we became so grown-up. Christmas is the most nostalgic time of the year. It is easy to reconnect with the wonder that Christmas inspired in us when we were still small.

Take a moment and think back to Christmas as a child. What memories and moods percolate to the surface? I go back to the darkened living room of my boyhood home. I was seven. My sister was three. The only lights in the living room came from the Christmas tree, which bathed the room in a soft, almost holy glow. I responded to that moment by forming a duet with my sister. We sang Christmas carols. We didn't sing with restraint. It was full-throated and heartfelt, almost as if a power had taken over our three and seven year old voices and turned us into a tiny Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Our Christmas memories reside in that part of our brain that has no clock or calendar to date them. We can feel now what we felt back then. It is as if no time has passed at all. At Christmas we give ourselves permission to revert, if only for a little while, to see once again with the eyes of a child.

In the Church of the Holy Seplacur of Bethlehem you can see the place where, tradition has it, that Jesus was born. In order to get to the site, you must go through an entrance designed to make you bow down. To avoid banging your head you must bend over, stoop, lower yourself, which, when you think about all The Incarnation means, is an appropriate posture. "For unless you become as a child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven," Jesus said. How else but as children can we hear this incredible story that too easily becomes dulled by our adult familiarity?

Think about the message we were given early on; "Do your very best. Be smart. Earn good grades. Grow up. Graduate with honors. Get into a good college. Be an achiever, or an over achiever, if at all possible. Be independent, free, unencumbered. Be successful. A big shot.

But we come to church at Christmas not to be put on the path of no-it-alls, but become children on their way to the Kingdom. Christmas sets us in the direction God went. The big became small. The extraordinary became the ordinary. Heaven descended to earth. The Spirit became flesh and blood. The immortal put on mortality. The throne was exchanged for a manger. The purple velvet of royalty was exchanged for swaddling cloths. God became a baby. The Lord God Almighty, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient needed bottled and burped and had colic and diaper rash, like any baby.

God asks us to come down the ladder we've been trying to climb most of our lives. The Christmas gospel doesn't tell us, "Grow up!" but "Grow down." We are not to be childish. Few people are as irksome as adults who have the emotional maturity of a child. The apostle Paul said, " When I became a man I gave up childish ways." We are not to be childish, but we are to be child-like…people who are wise enough to know that independence is not a desirable way to live because we are, each one, all of us, totally dependent upon God for our lives.

A few years ago I share a humorous and perceptive gem that said the life cycle is backward. Some of you may remember it;

Life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time, all your weekends, and
what do you get in the end of it? A watch. A pat on the back from
the boss. I think the life cycle is all backward.

You should die first, get that unpleasantness out of the way. Then
you live twenty years in an old age home. You get kicked out when
you're too young to be there. You get a gold watch; you go to work.
you work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your
retirement. You go to college; you party until you're ready for
high school; you go to grade school; you become a little kid; you
play. You have no responsibilities.

You become a little baby; you go back into the womb; you spend
your last nine months floating and you finish up as a gleam in
somebody's eye.

This suggests the direction which Christmas takes us…backwards, downward. Masters become servants. Big shots become small potatoes. Grown-ups who think they have outgrown their capacity for wonder having furnished their internal house with the facts of life, find themselves holding a little lit candle in a darkened church on Christmas eve, and without warning are reduced to absolute awe when they sing, "Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace." God became a baby. As Paul said in I Corinthians, "God chose what is foolish and insignificant, small in the eyes of the world to shame the wise."

Christmas casts a unique sort of spell upon those who think of themselves as too cultured, too educated, or too sophisticated. It can be the undoing of Scrooges and cynics, turning them upside-down, which as far as God's Kingdom is concerned, is right-side-up. I love the way C.S. Lewis put it: "What God did about us was this-the second person in God, the Son, became human himself…the Eternal Being who knows everything and who created the whole universe became not only a man, but before that a baby, and before that a fetus in a Woman's body. If you want to get the hang of it, think of how you would like to be a slug or a crab."

The church in which Ann Weems grew up was big on Christmas pageants. From early on she knew she wanted to be an angel. How thrilled she was the year she was chosen to play the part. But by the time she became an angel, she set her sights higher. She wanted to be Mary. Being the minister's daughter helped. Ann was sixteen when she was chosen to be Mary.

The church was on a hill surrounded by acres of land. The pageant was put on every night the week before Christmas. The set was by the highway and people would pull over to listen. They had a life-sized realistic stable complete with livestock. A loudspeaker carried the scripture reading and music. Ann wore an azure blue robe, a blue scarf around her neck, and makeup. She said, "I was holy! I felt absolutely ethereal." Joseph picked her up on a donkey at the church. They made their way down the driveway, then on the grass and on to Bethlehem by Hillsboro Road. She said, "It was my moment. I was enthralled by the holiness. All eyes were on me."

What she hadn't counted on was the performance of her little brother Bill who played an angel. His mother had Bill tested for deafness because he talked so loud. She dragged him to school when he was five years old and insisted that the principal keep him there all day. She didn't care about the rules. She was desperate.

Bill had an assigned place to kneel in the stable. When Ann was at her most ethereal, she saw Bill. His once white angel robe was splattered with mud. His halo was at a rakish angle. His annunciating posture had much to be desired. When their eyes met he put his hands to his ears and stuck out his tongue. He angelically elbowed the shepherds who were getting too close to his spot. The shepherds dominoed, and there knelt Bill, his hands under his chin angelically kneeling. Mary was not pleased.

When the pageant was over, Ann ran disgraced to the house and angrily asked her mother how she could have had such a child. Her mother answered that she had barely noticed it, and that people always thought the kids were cute and after all, he had found his kneeling place in Bethlehem.

Ann Weems writes; "It was Bill, not I who knew what it was like to yearn after a kneeling place in Bethlehem. I just wanted to be holier than thou. I wanted everyone to think I was beautiful and saintly."

Should this Christmas find you feeling all adult and grown-up and thoroughly familiar with God's dissent to earth by becoming a baby, maybe you should cock your halo at a rakish angle and behave like the Child of God you are.

Here's hoping you will find your kneeling place at Bethlehem, too.

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