Last night we had our family Christmas decorating night, which apparently reveals to my wife on an annual basis just how ridiculously perfectionistic I can be about certain things. Having grown up in a home where our Christmas trees were an annual festival of colored, flashing, bubbling lights with lots of ornaments all over the tree, I've become much more of a minimalist in my tree decorating as an adult. I like white lights, with a few ornaments, and I like them to be neat and orderly. Last night this meant that it took me about an hour to put the lights on the tree while Rita silently endured the torture and tried to keep the kids from killing each other. Ahhhh, the Spirit of Christmas!!
But as with my Christmas trees, as I've grown older I've also come to value a simpler, more minimalist Christmas celebration as well. Yesterday as we talked about unwrapping Christmas from the consumer packaging that has obscured the heart of Christmas I felt this again so powerfully. While culturally Christmas has been reduced to an excuse for us to buy gifts we don't need with money that we don't have, my hope is that within the community of people who are following Jesus we could resist that pull.
Underneath the consumer problem we have at Christmas time is a larger, deeper problem: it's a worship problem. Designed as we are to find worth and value outside of ourselves, during this season the culture provides a powerful place to worship - the retail altar. We convince ourselves this is a good thing because we're going to buy gifts to give away to others, but when it's about the gift exchange and the feelings that brings, then we're missing out on the heart of Christmas.
As we read about the Magi who came from the east to visit Jesus, the heart of Christmas was not the gifts that they brought to him, but the desire to come and worship before the king of kings. There is nothing wrong or sinful even about the exchange of gifts, but there is something wrong when that activity pushes the worship of Jesus to the fringes of our lives and leaves us worshipping the accumulation of stuff that will never really satisfy our hearts.
When we refocus our attention this season on Christ and the gift of his presence with us, then we are moved to worship him more deeply than ever before. This Christmas take some time to reflect on the idea that God has sent his son into the world as the King of a kingdom not of this world, and that action alone means we are being called into worship and obedience to this king. If everything else that clamors for our attention now takes away from our worship, then perhaps it's time to simplify again.
Next week we'll explore the idea that we don't have to follow the culture at Christmas, but that in Jesus' coming he was establishing a new kind of culture in the world. I hope you and a friend will join us here at 10:30! The week following will be our Christmas services - this year we will be holding service both on Christmas Eve at 7:00 PM and Christmas Day at 9:00 AM. We would love to have you and your family join us for one of these services.
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