Friends ... Christians hope the promise of Christmas adds up to year-round joy.  See new column below ... and we’ll be back next year! Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #841

December 27, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Summing Up Christmas

By Bob Walters

“Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” – Jesus, Mathew 6:18

I suppose I put up too many Christmas lights, and my wife Pam possibly bakes too many Christmas cookies … not that we plan to make any changes going forward.

Our neighbors, family, and friends – and co-workers, many of whom have become close friends – notice and appreciate our yearly Christmas holiday behaviors.  We have great fun expressing our joy in the season; it is a joy in Christ and an easy outpouring of our faithful love for Him … and Christian love for others.

I think there is plenty of evidence that our Christmas celebrating is not a matter of Pam and me coming out of a slumbering closet, awakening to our mission with Jesus only at the commercially and culturally “acceptable” Yuletide season.  We are thankful for the life we share, together, in Christ, and it’s a 24/7/365/Eternal fact of our existence.

Stumbles?  Yes (mainly me).  Perfection?  No (again, mainly me).  We don’t keep count, and living our lives in the forgiveness of Christ and forgiving with Christ provide peace, joy, and a divine closeness of relationship other Christians understand.  It’s a joy the secular Christmas crowd glimpses faintly but largely can’t fathom.  Thankfulness is one thing; thankfulness for a life in Christ is an entirely different ballgame, one where you don’t need to keep score and couldn’t quantify or count points if you tried.

The “true meaning of Christmas” is closer to that, i.e., not keeping score or seeing, empirically, “what it all adds up to.”  Giving with joy is its own reward.

Last month on a warmish central Indiana Thanksgiving weekend afternoon (funny how Christmas weekend arrived with sub-zero temperatures, blowing snow, and whoo-boy windchills in the minus 30s), several of us, including our very pleasant new neighbor lady across the street, were outside hanging Christmas lights.  When her husband arrived back from wherever he had been, he surveyed his house and then ours and in a friendly way shouted across the street, “Ah … competition!”

I shouted back, cheerfully, “It’s not competition, it’s Christmas!”  The lady agreed.

When I delivered Pam’s customary, generous cache of assorted, hand-decorated Christmas cookies to my many workmates, a kind lady sensing the enormity of effort Pam put into baking them, asked me, “How much time does she spend on these?”

I replied, with a broad smile, “It’s not time; it’s love.”  What a satisfying answer.

As we move past this “most wonderful time of the year” into our 2023 trip around the sun, I want to remember this and every Christmas not in terms of “how much time” or “how much money” or who gets the neighborhood Griswold Award for excessive Christmas lights.  Let’s store away our Christmas gear, not the Christmas in our hearts.

Jesus Christ – God coming to live among humanity to restore our relationship with the good, loving, unsurprisable, and unerringly righteous God of Creation – is truth for all time and love beyond all measurement.  As an expression of God’s love, Jesus is our sure hope.  He isn’t here to “beat Satan,” He’s here to show us how to love God and each other. Christmas isn’t the sum of an equation, it’s a divine mystery of God’s love.

Whatever we do at Christmas, it should be an unbridled expression of our love and God’s love, not judgement of human effort or measurement of worldly transaction.

Believe it when I say we are well aware – as are you – of the prideful, non-faith world that cynically takes great commercial advantage of the Christmas season.

My goal – our goal – is to take loving advantage of Jesus Christ all year long.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) suggests focusing on God’s love, not God’s rewards.

Christmas isn’t so much about “when” as it is about “why.”  Here are three good questions (and answers) to help understand the “true meaning of Christmas.”  Merry Christmas!  Bob

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Spirituality Column #840

December 20, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Timing Isn’t Everything, Part 2

By Bob Walters

And it came to pass …Joseph went up to Bethlehem … with Mary his espoused wife who was great with child. And … the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. – Luke 2:1-6

Rather than expend forensic effort on the logistical specifics of Jesus’s birth – what date, who was there, was it a stable or a cave, etc. – here are three questions we must ask ourselves … in faith … to understand the true meaning of Christmas:

1. Was Jesus born of the virgin Mary?

2. Was Jesus who He and the Bible say He was and is?

3. Why did Jesus come?

First, “Was Jesus born of the virgin Mary?”

For this one we’ll go word by word. 

Was – Did this event happen in history?  Yes.

Jesus – Did a man named Jesus exist?  Yes.

Born – Was Jesus a fact/creation of human biology? Yes.

Of the virgin – Biologically, naturally impossible, but “nothing is impossible with God (Luke 1:37).

Mary – Yes, Mary existed, and was a human woman.

So … Was Jesus born of the virgin Mary? Yes.  That establishes the miracle.

Second, “Was Jesus who he said he was?”

Throughout the Gospels Jesus calls God His Father.  That makes Jesus God’s son.  Was Jesus fully God and fully human?  Jesus says he will go back to the father, in heaven, and prepare a “room” for all who believe.  He has to be God to do that.  Jesus says he will send the spirit to comfort and educate believers.  He has to be God to do that.  Jesus lived, worked, spoke, bled, and died.  He had to be human to do that.

But was Jesus truly part of the Godhead, the Trinity?  Jesus spoke of God the Father and of the Holy Spirit in terms that included He, himself, Jesus.  Yes, Jesus was part of the Trinity (by the way, the word “trinity” does not appear in the Bible; Tertullian invented it in the second century).  

“Yes” here establishes Jesus’s identity: God/Man.

Now … third.  “Why did Jesus come?”

It is the biggest question of all.  The easy answer of course is that Jesus came for our forgiveness and our salvation.  But what was God’s purpose in miraculously sending His Son into humanity? Why Jesus?  Why not just a flick of God’s divine fingers to say, “Snap!  It’s all fixed.”?  Answer: Because there is neither faith nor glory in that snap.

Nor is there reciprocating love, truth, education, or obedience.  There is nothing about ourselves becoming the humble and selfless sacrifice that Jesus presents to the world.  We could never understand the glory of our relationship with God.  We may not feel very glorious in our earthly, broken, sinful, aching bodies, but our relationship with God’s glory and righteousness that we have through our faith in Christ and with the urging of the Holy Spirit … that’s what the Law on those tablets could never provide.

Jesus Christ was a canvas of God’s life humans could understand.  Jesus didn’t tell us how to act; He told us to love.  He told us who we could be – who we were, who we are – in God’s creation, God’s eternity … and God’s love.

That’s the true meaning of Christmas.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) celebrates the savior and loves the celebration.