The First Christmas
By George Halitzka
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"The First Christmas" is a message presented by George Halitzka at the Highland Vineyard Church on December 7, 2008. Follow this link to read the underlying Scripture text.
I still remember the year there were no presents under our tree.
Money was extraordinarily tight. Even more so than usual in our family, where Dad was perpetually trying to find work during the 1980s recession in a Rust Belt town. I was nine or ten—too young to look at the grand scheme of life and decide presents were no big deal . . . but too old not to understand what was happening.
It didn’t hit me till Christmas Eve. I thought my folks were just doing their usual last-minute shopping. Mom and Dad didn’t tell us, probably from shame and hoping somehow, there would be a little money at the last minute. But on Christmas Eve, when Mom finally broke the news gently, I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t imagine looking at our tree; the site of my first bike and working gumball machine just a few years before; and not seeing a single present.
I cried—retreated to my room and bawled, because nothing could make Christmas all right.
Oh, Christmas morning was not so dreadful as I’d feared. Dad went to a twenty-four hour convenience store; bought candy and cookies so we could unwrap something. Mom made a series of coupons, promising us special outings for the next six months—a dinner at a real restaurant in February; mini-golf in May. Those were big events in our house, where money was so tight—so my brother and sister and I had something to look forward to. Looking back, I think my parents did a great job of making the best of a bad situation.
But that didn’t change my ten-year-old reality that long-ago morning. Somehow, that year it wasn’t quite Christmas. There was something missing.
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Perhaps you’re thoroughly steeped in the Christmas spirit by now, and can’t wait for the Big Day to come. I hope and pray that’s where this Christmas finds you! But maybe the holidays aren’t looking much like a Norman Rockwell painting in your world. Maybe you feel like something is missing under your tree, too. December, when we feel an obligation to be cheerful, has a way of heightening our awareness of what is not right with life.
In my own life, I remember the first year we couldn’t have Christmas at Grandpa’s house any more, the way we had every year since I was born, because Grandpa had sold his house and moved into assisted living. And two years after that, we couldn’t have Christmas with him at all, because he’d gone to be with Jesus. It hurt more in December, because after all, it was Christmas.
Maybe you can’t relate in your own life this year, but maybe you know someone who is in desperate need of hope. I was friends with a family back in Cleveland; I’ll call them the Carters. Mom was raising two kids by herself. Glenn, her son, wrestled with depression and something that may have been bipolar disorder throughout high school. Then just before Thanksgiving one year, he committed suicide. I’m guessing his Mom didn’t find a lot to be thankful for that year.
Yes, the holidays definitely heighten our awareness of what’s not right in the world. Even if your world looks merry and bright, perhaps you’re wondering how some of the people around you can possibly find hope and meaning in Christmas—or really, in life in general. Hope, that rare and precious commodity, is what we need God to put in our stories this year more than anything else.
Don’t get me wrong—if you follow Jesus, you know where your ultimate hope lies. You look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come; amen. But what about now? What about this moment, when God has not set the world right and loss is a fact of life and we know that nothing is ever quite as it should be? Can God retell your present story with hope?
Earlier in worship we heard the story of the very first Christmas, and maybe there we can find what we’re looking for. But I know you’ve heard it 83 ½ times before. So we’ll try looking a little deeper than usual in our quest for God to retell our stories . . . with Chrstmas Hope.
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To be honest, I think sometimes we miss the hope of Christmas because we’re in a rush to transform it into Easter.
Easter is somehow easier to understand than Christmas. We humans are good at death and destruction. So we get the whole cross thing. It’s not hard to imagine someone dying; we’ve seen it with our own eyes.
And when it comes to the resurrection—well, there are definitely days when it seems too good to be true, but the concept of rising from the dead isn’t hard. Somewhere inside, we all long to live forever. The Philosopher of Ecclesiastes says, “[God] has set eternity in the hearts of men.” So we understand Jesus coming back from the grave.
However, when we think about God Himself pooping and puking; the Almighty reducing himself from beyond the size of the universe to a microscopic human being . . . For most of us, a dying man is easier to grasp than a humble God.
So we transform the Christmas holiday into Easter. We preach that baby Jesus was born to die. And that’s true enough so far as it goes—Jesus’ destination was always the cross, where he would pay for our sins. But Christmas has a story of its own that we’re in danger of missing, because somehow, it’s even harder to understand. The much-ballyhooed “real meaning of Christmas” can be found in one tiny verse from John 1: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
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Stop just a moment and think about that. The Word—the Eternal God, who depends on no one for anything, who created even the angels: He became a microscopic fetus in the womb of a pregnant teenager, utterly dependent on her. Then he went from a warm, secure womb to a cold world, full of the smells of a barnyard and the indignity of having his diaper changed. (Think about that; God needing a diaper change. It sounds sacrilegious.) He drank milk from Mary’s breasts for survival. The one who created water got thirsty; the one who designed food was hungry.
When he was just a toddler, he ran for his life from insanely jealous King Herod who was so fearful of a rival to the throne that he carried out wholesale infanticide. God himself, who from heaven could have destroyed Herod with nothing but a word, ran for his life.
The Almighty, who had never seen the shadow of death, who never had to suffer the pain of loss, chose to come where he would lose those close to him. He wept when friends died. His family thought he was insane and tried to get him off the streets. He was accused of being in league with Satan. Finally, he was completely rejected by his own nation and crucified by popular demand. That’s what Christmas—God becoming one of us—is all about in a nutshell.
But while it demonstrates Christ’s humanity, that’s still a somewhat depressing view of the story. How does that bring us hope?
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About five years ago on Christmas Eve, I was at my home church feeling distinctively un-Christmas-y. I was in a foul mood, and being roped into babysitting the copier to print extra bulletins wasn’t helping. I started reading the lyrics to the worship songs, and suddenly, a question hit me out of nowhere:
Why did he do it?
Why would Jesus endure everything it meant to be human? Why would he live in a sin-scarred world full of suffering? Why would he become one of us? Yes, “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us”—but why?
And it dawned on me; the only conceivable answer: love. The same reason a mother and father give up money and time and sleep for a baby—but on a much grander scale. The same reason you helped your best friend move or gave them a hundred bucks when they needed it—but elevated to a superhuman level. Pure love is the only possible explanation for Immanuel; God with us.
God could have let us continue cheerfully down the road to death and hell. Or he could have picked a less messy way to save us from ourselves. But the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. Why?
Perhaps because the most loving thing Jesus could do, besides rescuing us from our sins, was to show us that all of life had meaning; it all was noble and even glorious—because God himself lived it.
If you’re stuck babysitting a copier on Christmas Eve, remember Jesus once made tables for a living. If you’re working a job that seems meaningless this Christmas or suffering from pain in your body, remember that Jesus gave it dignity when he spent years as a craftsman and probably caught the flu and chicken pox. Remember that you are loved so extravagantly that God wore diapers for you.
Love Himself cared enough to show us that every aspect of our earthly lives; every bit of what we call drudgery and pain; is so important that God himself did it with us. Our eternity begins in time and our years are not wasted, because Jesus said “life matters” in the most profound way possible.
I believe God wants to retell your story with hope this Christmas. And it begins when you embrace that the Word becoming flesh puts meaning—even glory—into every part of this life that Jesus lived with you.
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But maybe hope still seems impossible this Christmas. Maybe it’s not just minor circumstances that have you down; perhaps you wonder some days if it’s worth getting out of bed. Perhaps you feel like you’re marking time waiting to die; your life seems to echo another verse from the Philosopher of Ecclesiastes: “Meaningless! Meaningless! . . . Everything is meaningless . . . a chasing after the wind.”
Feeling worthless—meaningless. It may be the worst feeling in the world. Hope is all but impossible.
Come with me while we consider the story of someone in Jesus’ life who looked, at least on the outside, completely worthless.
The girl was an ethnic minority in a segregated ghetto town. Her childhood was spent in a trailer park by the tracks, just outside a village where everybody knew everything about everyone else. Worse, she was a female in a culture that liked to pray, “Thank God I’m not a heathen, a slave—or a woman.”
Her boyfriend was about to ask for the promise ring back and dump her. But who could blame him? Her folks conveniently sent her out of town to stay with some relatives, but everybody knew. She was already showing. And she was only fifteen.
By any other name, she was worthless.
But the miraculous thing is that God still cared for her; even spoke to her. Through the angel he said some remarkable words that sound commonplace only because of their perpetual retelling:
“Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
Did you catch that? What Gabriel spoke to Mary, that worthless girl from Nazareth? The Lord is with you. God was walking with her in what seemed on the outside to be a pointless life. In fact, he was about to come grow inside her as a child! From now on, her life would be anything but ordinary, because she had carried Divinity in her womb.
But let’s not miss the significance of this for us. If we follow Jesus, we also have the Lord with us. In fact, we even have Divinity living within us! Please don’t misunderstand me—you are not a little god. But the Almighty One—the Holy Spirit—does live within you, as impossible as it sounds! “Do you not know,” asked Paul rhetorically in I Corinthians 6:19, “that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” Just like Mary, the Lord is with us—in fact, he lives within us—if we’ve decided to follow Jesus.
It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from. Mary was a charity case from the youth group in a backwoods redneck town. She was worthless in every pair of eyes but God’s. Yet God chose her for an immense responsibility—and an honor so great we remember her to this day as the earthly mother of God Himself.
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I think Glenn, my friend who committed suicide, probably didn’t understand the honor God had given him. Oh, he believed in Jesus—his friend Sara led him to Christ a year or so before he died. So I believe I’ll see him in heaven someday. But I think maybe his understanding of salvation only went as far as Easter—the promise of resurrection. I think he missed out on the message of hope in Christmas.
Amidst the blackest depths of depression, he became convinced that God had nothing more for his earthly life. I imagine Glenn felt like a worthless outcast, crying to the vacant heavens and hearing silence in return. His life was derailed; he’d lost hope of anything good ever happening again. Tragically, he missed the hope of God living among us.
I believe if Glenn had been listening, he would have heard God whisper, “You, the outcast with a past . . . you, the scarred and despairing sinner who thinks God has left you for God—you, the battered soul who doesn’t know how you’ll make it through an hour much less a month; a year; a life . . . Christmas is for you. It’s a time to remember that I was a man like you, and I still live inside you today.”
Think of the glory Mary carried in her womb and in her heart; the glory of God moving and kicking within her. Remember the glory that you carry in your heart—the glory of the Holy Spirit living inside of you, beginning the moment you decided to follow Jesus.
Reach across history to the Man born to a worthless teenager. See the way he carried his burdens so he could relate to you; so you could believe God might have some purpose in your pain. Ask the one who was despised and rejected by men to use you for something marvelous.
That’s what happened in Mary’s life. It can happen in yours, too . . . because you and Mary both have God living within. As Gabriel said, “The Lord is with you.”
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That applies to everyone, folks. Everyone in this room; in this world; who follows Jesus as your Forgiver and Leader. “The Lord is with you.” The Lord has plans for your life as long as he leaves you on earth—no matter what circumstances you’re in.
I know a woman who married her sweetheart years ago and settled down for some happily ever after. Then her new husband suddenly endured a traumatic head injury. He survived, but something went horribly wrong. He now suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.
He works in an automotive plant when the medication’s working. Other times he’s threatened his wife with a knife because he thought she was evil, or actually believed he was God.
Neither one of them signed up for this when they took their marriage vows. The wife told me that on occasions when her husband is lucid, they like to talk about heaven; how all things will be made new and they’ll live without the shadow of any disease.
That’s why Easter is so important, folks. It’s because this life is not all there is; because we can look forward to the day when God wipes every tear from our eyes and makes all things new. Easter tells us that if we believe Jesus died and rose from the dead to forgive our sins and grant eternal life, we are united with him forever. Famous evangelist D. L. Moody once said, “Someday you will read in the papers that Moody is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now.”
But without the Incarnation, everything stops right there. Life meanwhile is a pointless affair punctuated alternately by terror and sadness. The schizophrenic husband I was telling you about should be institutionalized, or maybe just end it all sometime when his disease plunges him into the depths of despair. The wife should divorce him and move on with life.
But God becoming flesh means that life is precious and what we do on earth matters in heaven. Even more importantly, it says suffering has a purpose.
Jesus endured diapers and hunger and disease for 33 or so years so we’d know God is with us through it all. He cried for the dead and suffered with the broken because we needed direction and were too foolish to hear it from anyone but another human. Then he bled from a flogging and a dubious crown before he hung on the cross to save the world.
So is it possible that somehow, when we know Christ, our suffering redeems someone, too? I don’t mean we become Messiahs—but somehow, our suffering helps someone else see hope in pain; gives them courage to keep going? Perhaps even shows someone the face of their suffering Savior?
Many people ask why God allows so much suffering—and I’m one of them. I don’t claim to have many answers. But from personal experience, too, I can give you at least one. Pain happens so that you can bring hope to someone else’s life by sharing their pain, in a way that only someone who’s lived through it can. Paul said in II Corinthians 1, “God comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort others with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”
In a nutshell, that’s the whole reason why Jesus did something so messy as get born and grow up into a man. So he could share in our afflictions, and comfort us within them.
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You may have noticed, maybe even today, that it looks like my head tilts a bit to one side. Have any observant souls noticed that? I was born with scoliosis of the cervical spine. One of my vertebrae has a triangular shape, and as a result, my neck tilts.
When I was in middle school, it was probably the thing that kids picked on me for the most. Or in any case, it was the one that hurt the most. I would lie awake at night crying, praying for God to take this away from me. I remember it ruined part of one Christmas break for me. I dreaded, dreaded, dreaded going back to school, where the kids would mock me all over again.
Unfortunately, God never fixed my neck. I couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t an all-powerful God do some healing? Couldn’t he end the taunts and abuse? Couldn’t he at very least turn this around for good?
And then one day, a few years after college, my pastor-friend Tim asked me to do a motivational speech for a group of rowdy sixth graders—something on bullying. I reluctantly agreed. I started to share my story, and as Tim pointed out later, it wasn’t until I started talking about my neck that they shut up and listened. Because then they knew that I shared their pain of growing up; they knew I understood what it meant to be picked on. And somehow, my words began to sink in. I spent the next three years of my life talking to 15,000 or so teenagers about showing respect and compassion for each other. Each time, I gained their trust with my own pain.
But really, it wasn’t my words I was sharing. They were words that God had put inside me by giving a dubious gift of suffering when I was in junior high. God turned around the thing that used to make me cry myself to sleep at night for good.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s true: When we are suffering, God wants to use our pain to retell someone else’s story with hope. And in the process, it may also grant us hope in return.
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So if you’re searching for meaning this Christmas, look to the manger. Look at the One who came down to a place where God would need his diaper changed; where he loved you so much that he would sacrifice Divinity to give dignity and worth to all this painful life. If you need hope, remember that just like Mary, the Lord is with you, because just like her, you have God living within you.
But most of all, remember that God has a purpose in your suffering. He wants to use your pain to bring healing to someone else. That’s why Jesus came to earth in the first place—to identify with our pain all the way to the cross, where he would finally defeat pain and death.
Remember, the very first Christmas was bleak and disappointing—an unplanned pregnancy; a long journey; a birth in a dirty stable. But out of it came the hope of the whole world. So ask God to let you birth hope in just one person this year from your own Christmas disappointments.
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We’re going to pray in a moment—and as we do, I ask you to raise your hands to God if you need meaning and encouragement this Christmas. Ask him; plead with him; to bring the hope of the manger; the hope of God-Made-Man; deep into your heart.
But I would remind you that raising your arms is not only a sign of receiving, it is a sign of surrender. And so I’m asking you to surrender your pain and disappointment to God—telling him he is free to use it to bring hope to someone else who can identify with your hurts. In fact, ask him to show you at least one person during the holidays that you can encourage with the grace he’s put in your life.
I don’t know what that giving hope from your pain will look like. I never expected to speak about my pain to middle schoolers. But will you surrender yours to God, letting him have full use of it, so that for someone he brings into your life, it can be transformed into hope? I believe he can do it—if you'll let him.
Let’s pray . . .
This manuscript was written to be used for oral delivery. Therefore, it reflects the unique strengths and limitations of that medium.
Copyright © 2008 by George Halitzka. All rights reserved. Scripture taken from, or adapted from, the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. The "NIV" and "New International Version" trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.