The Seventh Day of Christmas: Christmas According to John Wesley

December 31, 2015 Daniel Harris

Does Christmas have any real impact on how I will live in 2016? Now that we are a week into these twelve days of Christmas, and entering a new year tomorrow, what do these Christmas themes of adoration of our incarnate Messiah have to say about how we will live? Maybe considering the entire upcoming year can be too big to be very helpful. It's probably more meaningful to narrow the focus: how will Christmas shape how I will spend the first week of the new year? The point always has to do with right now, so, how will my desire to be one who adores Christ shape how I spend December 31 and New Year's Day?

If I want to consider how I will live today, tomorrow, next week, and next year in light of the fact that the Messiah has come and is here, the way we normally set goals and New Year's resolutions tends to fall a bit short of what we really need. So, here's an unconventional resolution I'm setting for myself in light of the magnitude of Christmas:

The Sixth Day of Christmas: Twelve Years After the Manger

December 30, 2015 Daniel Harris

I can be a remarkably patient father for a full five minutes. After that, a lot of variables come into play, but once I’m past the five-minute mark, my patience tank often ends up running on fumes. I wasn’t always this way. In fact, if I think back through my life, I can identify some major turning points in my own character. For example, I was once an exceptionally unselfish person. Then I got married. Whatever unselfishness remained after entering marriage also seemed to vanish, right along with my patience and level-headedness, once our children were born.

Of course, despite how I might like to convince myself otherwise, my selfishness and impatience were really part of me all along, but it took the closeness of these very cherished family relationships to bring me face-to-face with my own flaws. So, as a father whose patience tank often runs on empty, even with these kids whom I love so dearly, I find Luke’s final story about Jesus’ childhood to be strangely comforting.

I have two exceptionally kind children (not to mention how cute, talented, smart, humble, etc. they are...and I think I’ve read somewhere that each of those traits can be traced to the skill of the father in the family–especially the humility). Yet even with as great as my kids are, I can’t really wrap my mind around what it might have been like to parent the incarnate Messiah. I think that’s part of why I have found this story at the end of Luke’s second chapter to be much more encouraging in the years since I became a parent. Though it isn’t the point of the story, this passage shows that–regardless of the child’s identity–those on whom we gazed in awe and wonder when they were infants can come to push the limits of any mother or father.

The Fifth Day of Christmas: Christmas According to Mark

December 29, 2015 Daniel Harris

After dwelling on it for a while, I think this is the most fitting thing to write regarding Christmas according to Mark:
“_______________________________
________________________________
________________________________."

Christmas according to John was challenging, since there is no Christmas story in John. But Christmas according to Mark–that’s impossible. Not only is there no Christmas story, but neither is there anything close to John’s “the Word became flesh.” So, in a way, to try to comment on Christmas according to Mark is to try to comment on nothing. So, if you’d like, feel free to call it a day with the wordless paragraph above, and then we’ll wrap up our exploration of the four gospels tomorrow.

But–if you’re curious–here’s a question that’s nagging me: is it possible that the total absence of Christmas in Mark’s gospel speaks volumes? Could it be that Mark’s no-Christmas might lead us into some really good questions for our effort to let these twelve days be as full of meaning as possible?

The Fourth Day of Christmas: Christmas According to John

December 28, 2015 Daniel Harris

The only problem with trying to write “Christmas According to John” is that there is no Christmas story in John.

John gives us no stories about Mary being with child before being wed to Joseph, nothing about shepherds finding a baby in a manger, no dreams with messages from God about the baby. Joseph is never a character in the story, except basically as part of Jesus’ name (“Jesus, son of Joseph”). Mary doesn’t show up much–she’s at the wedding when Jesus turned water into wine near the beginning of John’s gospel, and then at the cross, near the conclusion.

Yet it’s a characteristic of this fascinating gospel that just because John never mentions something directly, we cannot conclude that he had nothing to say about it. Rather, we might want to listen with very attentive ears and see how he may want to give us a very different perspective on the well-known stories of Jesus’ life.

The Third Day of Christmas: Christmas According to Matthew (and Joseph)

December 27, 2015 Daniel Harris

A number of years ago, I wanted to learn about how God speaks to people. I figured that the Bible would be a good source of information on the subject, and that the beginning of the New Testament would be as good a place as any to start. So, I opened the beginning of Matthew and began reading with particular attention to times that God would communicate something to someone. I read through the first two chapters of Matthew, then paused my study (which I never did get around to continuing again in that way), because of my disappointment that I had never been spoken to in a dream as was apparently so common in the Bible.

Indeed, if the first two chapters of Matthew were the entirety of our Bible, we might appropriately expect that if God wanted to say something to us, doing so through a dream would be his favorite means of doing so. It happens five times in these two chapters. What I missed by pausing my study when I did was that those are the only five occurrences in the New Testament of God communicating to people specifically through dreams.

Realizing this helps us to notice the particular way in which Matthew is telling the Christmas story. Whereas the first two chapters of Luke emphasized Mary’s experience, Matthew highlights both the urgency of those messages communicated through those five dreams, and the character of the person who received four of them: Joseph. None of those dreams carried easy messages, nor was any of Joseph’s experience as Matthew tells it the kind of thing that gets printed in images on our Christmas cards. In other words, it’s for good reason that wise Linus went to Luke’s second chapter rather than Matthew’s to tell Charlie Brown what Christmas is all about.

The Second Day of Christmas: Christmas According to Luke (and Mary), Continued

December 26, 2015 Daniel Harris

It’s now December 26, which means Christmas in the culture around us is over. Stores that have had Christmas items on sale since at least October have moved on. The “Merry Christmas” greetings I exchanged with a stranger yesterday have stopped until next December. And the irony of perhaps my least favorite Christmas song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” is that as many times as we may have heard it during the days leading up to yesterday, we are much less likely to hear it during the actual twelve days of Christmas–especially by the time we would get to the lords a-leaping, pipers piping, and drummers drumming in early January.

Honestly, I’m fine with that kind of Christmas being behind us until it begins again next year. (Maybe it now begins after Labor Day? I remember hearing a radio station mark when there were one hundred shopping days left, which would have been on September 16.) But the other dimension of Christmas, the one where waiting has now turned into adoration–I feel like I need a lot more of this kind of Christmas, or I will have missed the point.

The First Day of Christmas: Christmas According to Luke (and Mary)

December 25, 2015 Daniel Harris

When Charlie Brown yelled in desperation, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” his friend Linus calmly replied, “Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about.” Then Linus moved to center stage and quoted from the second chapter of Luke. Linus knew the right place to go, and today–Christmas Day–we go there too as we begin this twelve-day journey of adoration of our Messiah. We do so because it is through the first two chapters of Luke that we get a glimpse of Christmas through the eyes of one who certainly knew what it meant to gaze in awe and adoration at the newborn king: Mary.

Luke alone mentions many of the details of that first Christmas: Mary and Joseph’s travel to Bethlehem, placing the baby in a manger because there were no rooms for them, the shepherds in the fields, and the angelic message of “good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” If I want to complete the move from Advent’s waiting to Christmas’ adoration, and to enter this first day of Christmas with the appropriate awe for what today represents, the words I want to start with are Luke’s, because the eyes I want to see through are Mary’s.