The Ninth Day of Christmas: Christmas According to Isaiah

January 2, 2016 Daniel Harris

It’s safe to say that Isaiah son of Amoz would be surprised to have his words included in a series of Christmas devotions being written by a Gentile Texan some 2,700 years after he lived. I wonder if he might go beyond being surprised and even issue me an old-style prophet’s rebuke, which he certainly knew how to do. The reason he might not see his inclusion here as an honor is because we Christians are often guilty of not listening to what he spent his life trying to say, because we think we already know the point. That is particularly true with the passages from Isaiah most important for us during these twelve days, those that get read and quoted during Christmas.

As I was getting ready to work on this series and spent some time looking at the traditional scripture readings for these twelve days, I was struck by how many of them come from Isaiah. For example, during the three year cycle of lectionary readings, the gospel of Mark never shows up. Four readings are from Matthew. John has six. And even Luke's eleven appearances share the lead for the most common source–with Isaiah.

The Eighth Day of Christmas: Christmas According to Paul

January 1, 2016 Daniel Harris

My name is Daniel Ethan Harris. My father, David Edwin Harris, was my hero, and I grew up being very proud of being able to scribble DEH on things and convincing myself that then no one would be able to tell whether the item was mine or his. When my wife and I found out we were expecting a son, we knew we wanted to pass on the initials, and he is named David Ethan Harris, after both my dad and me. And yes, the tradition continues–I often see my initials scribbled on things around the house, pointing to the common parts of our identity. It makes me glad every time.

Why is your name what it is? Did your parents just like its sound, or was it given to you as something they hoped would carry meaning throughout your life? As is the case for my son, it might be a name intentionally meant to connect you to the stories of people in previous generations. Or, perhaps, the name itself carries a meaning.

Today is the eighth day of Christmas, a day in which we pay particular attention to the name given to our Messiah. Following Jewish custom, Mary and Joseph took the baby to be circumcised on the eighth day, and he was then "called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”

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.