The Standard Christmas Message

Sunday, December 21, 2025

It’s the Fourth Sunday of Advent, “Love” Sunday, Christmas Sunday.  There is a standard sermon for this occasion I have heard countless time in my life – that Christmas is about Jesus, not presents – that Christmas is a spiritual event, not a temporal one.  It’s a prescription against materialism.  So common is this sermon that it defined my knee-jerk reaction to this piece about the return of Christmas time tourism to Nazareth in Israel after the cease fire.  “How crass,” I thought, “that’s a very holy place – it should be about something more uplifting at Christmas than mere commerce.”  But then, as I sat here preparing to roll out the standard Christmas message, I thought again.

I recalled my own visit to Nazareth, more than a decade ago now.  I reflected on the sign that greeted me, written in Arabic and English, it quoted the Koran and informed me that because I was not Islamic I was “a loser.”  I reflected on the poverty of the place, so apparent in contrast to the magnificence of the Basilica of the Annunciation therein.  I thought of my very Jewish guide trying to tell me about Christian stories which he knew but did not understand in a very Arab place.

That in turn got me thinking about a night in the People’s Republic of China, decades earlier.  This was back in the early days when China’s efforts to liberalize their economy seemed real and I was there working in one of the so-called “economic exclusion zones” – little islands where capitalism thrived in the otherwise heavily controlled economy.  The money behind the project I was working on was displaced Iranian royalty – displaced, of course, by the revolution that created the current Islamic Republic.  One night, for entertainment, I ended up bowling in the basement bowling alley of a hotel that catered to Japanese capitalists with the former Finance Minister of Iran  (He was Bahá’i) drinking imported Dutch beer.

Why did my mind travel that path?  What could those stories possibly have in common?  They are both almost painfully multi-cultural – and it was commerce that made all those disparate cultures cooperate.  It was commerce that made all those people that should not get along, get along.  It wasn’t Kum-Ba-Yah preaching and singing – it was the pursuit of financial gain.

Which brings me back to Christmas.  Christmas in this country is crassly commercial.  From the decorations to the presents to the entertainment – everybody is chasing a buck.  But everybody is doing it – even people without a hint of the origins and true meaning of Christmas.  And therein lies an opportunity – An opportunity to tell the actual story of Christmas.  Charles Schultz understood that (warning – that link begins with an interminable amount of advertising before it gets to the story) and so should we.  But then, like my Jewish guide in Nazareth, a lot of people already know the story, we want to get them from there to believers.

That, my friends, demands much of us.  Something, somehow, in the way we travel through the commercial battlefield of Christmas, or the culturally diverse but commercially cohesive battlefields of the world must speak to the fact that the story is not merely a story.  It is a miracle, a massive miracle, a life changing miracle.  The standard Christmas message is not about eschewing the commercialism of Christmas, it’s about approaching it differently than everyone else.  It’s about actually being Christian, in the image of Christ, not just talking about it.