Christmas Is Not Your Birthday – Expect a Miracle *
Sycamore Creek Church
December 8/9, 2013
Tom Arthur 

Merry Christmas Friends!

Is it too early to say that?  No way.  Stores started decorating for Christmas weeks ago.  We put our Christmas decorations up the week before Thanksgiving so they’d be up to enjoy over Thanksgiving weekend.  So, Merry Christmas!  It’s never too early to say it.

But what are we saying when we say Merry Christmas?  What we’re really doing is saying, “Be merry because a birthday is coming!”  But whose birthday?  Your birthday?  Your kids birthday?  Your grandkids birthday?  No, Christmas is not your birthday.

That’s the series we’re beginning today: Christmas Is Not Your Birthday. Over the next several weeks we’re going to look at how to celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ birthday rather than our own.

Here’s the problem we run into every year with Christmas: Christmas has become too predictable.  What we need this year is a miracle!  Christmas is the perfect place for a miracle:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
~The Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 9:6 KJV)

Hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth the prophet Isaiah predicted a miraculous birth, the birth of a baby who would be God and who would bring peace.  That’s quite a birth, quite a miracle!  But how did we get from that, Jesus’ birthday, to this?

The traditional “perfect” Christmas today includes: chaotic consumerism, stressed shopping, a terrible to-do list, disastrous date books, awful agendas, and deep deep debt (a pledge of allegiance to an economic Christmas orgy of overspending and debt).  Jesus was to be called the Counselor.  Maybe we should call him the Financial Counselor?  The traditional Christmas isn’t traditional at all.  It’s a “mixture of…a little biblical truth…some eighteenth-century Victorian practices, and…a double shot of Santa theology” (Thank you Mike Slaughter) on steroids provided by Madison Avenue with a shot of eggnog to make it all go down.

We’re left with the question: What exactly does God look like if this is how we celebrate the birth of the one called The Mighty God?  God ends up looking like Santa Claus?  God becomes a genie in a bottle with three wishes (if you’re good enough).

My own Christmas growing up was like this.  I remember when my grandma would hand me the J.C. Penny Catalogue and tell me to circle the things I wanted from it.  Now that I look back on this, it seems absurd to me.  My grandma lived so simply that when she died all my mom had to do to clean out her possessions was to empty one drawer at the nursing home!  And yet she bought into the whole traditional Christmas when it came to her own grandkids.  Another aspect of the traditional Christmas with my family was that kids of divorced parents cashed in big at Christmas.  Here’s how my Christmas schedule went:

Christmas Eve: Gifts with my dad’s parents
Christmas 6AM: Gifts with my dad and step-mom
Christmas 8AM: Gifts with my step-mom’s family
Christmas Noon: Gifts with my mom’s family
Christmas Afternoon: Gifts with my mom and step-dad.

Boom baby!  It’s one of the few times that being a kid in a divorced family pays off.  And of course, all these family members are doing their best to make sure that the other side of the family doesn’t one-up them!

So if this is how we celebrate the birth of the one called Mighty God, what does that God look like?  Something is really jacked up, isn’t it?  It’s jacked up because this baby wasn’t called Santa.  This baby was called Jesus, the Prince of Peace.  God doesn’t look like Santa, God looks like Jesus:

Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
~St. Paul (Colossians 3:15 NLT)

In Jesus we see God and also humanity, at its fullest.  Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your mind around God, but Jesus is easier.  Jesus is a God I can believe in.  And that’s a miracle.

The miracle of Jesus is that he was ordinary and yet extraordinary.  He was ordinary in that he was born in an empire-occupied territory to an unwed mother.  His parents were poor and lived as refugees in Africa amidst genocide back home.  He grew up in Nazareth, a small town in the middle of the U.P. (OK, just kidding about the U.P. thing).  He was a basic laborer.  He worked with his hands as a carpenter.  Jesus’ background was not extraordinary.  It was about as average or below average as they come.

And yet Jesus’ birth was also extraordinary and miraculous.

All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’).
~The Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 7:14 NLT)

Jesus is God with us and he was extraordinary in so many ways.  His message was a message of healing.  Jesus’ first sermon was also from the prophet Isaiah.  He stood up in the synagogue and read:

God’s Spirit is on me;
he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and
recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”
(Luke 4:18-19 The Message)

He was the son of God full of power and yet he reached out to those who were powerless.  He was ultimately executed on a cross and resurrected three days later.  He was ordinary but extraordinary.  If God can work an extraordinary miracle through an ordinary Jesus, then he can work a miracle through any ordinary person, including you and me this Christmas.  In fact, you are God’s miracle worker!

This miracle is going to take some preparing for.  Christmas is Jesus’ birth and that means there is going to be a labor.  Preparing for the miracle this Christmas requires the cost of labor pains.  This birth was no “silent night.”  In fact, that song is really just about as silly as they come.  Sentimental, yes.  Realistic, no.  The birth probably looked more like this:

Jesus’ life cost him something.  He lives.  He taught and was persecuted by the religious establishment.  He was executed on a cross.  He raised from the dead.  All of those who closely followed him were persecuted and executed as well, except one who was sent into exile.  Those are some serious labor pains, not sentimental silent nights.  As Mike Slaughter says, “The real Christmas was a snapshot of poverty and anxiety, not feel-good warm fuzzies.”

So this Christmas we need another miracle.  We need the miracle of giving up on the “traditional Christmas” and building new traditions that put the celebration back on Jesus’ birthday, and this miracle is going to take some birth pains.  It’s going to require you to give up some stuff that makes Christmas look more like your birthday or your kids birthday.  It’s going to require you instituting some new traditions that look more like celebrating Jesus and what Jesus’ life was all about, his purpose.

What’s the goal or purpose of your life?  Is it “the good life”?  Retirement?  Golf every day?  Walking on the beach and collecting shells?  Sitting in your man cave watching ESPN1, 2, & 3 on your 80 inch HD TV?  Shopping till you drop?  Lying around in a hammock?  Those all might be OK for a season, but if that’s the ultimate goal of your life, then you’re life is going to get pretty boring pretty quickly.  My step-dad just retired.  He’s done good as a small business owner.  He sold his business to one of his most faithful employees.  He’s got a good life with my mom.  They have a house in Indianapolis and two in Florida.  They’re pretty set for the rest of their lives.  But about two weeks into retirement he got pretty bored sitting in his living room with his iphone watching sports on his super huge TV.  He told me that he was trying to figure out what to do with his life now that he’s retired.  He went to his pastors and asked if they could use him volunteering fifteen or twenty hours a week.  He wants his retirement to make a difference in somebody’s life.  He wants to serve others.  He wants his life to be like Jesus’ life.

As Mike Slaughter says, the new meaning and purpose of our lives at Christmas is that “We find meaning when we give sacrificially to those in need, because by doing so, we are giving to Jesus himself.  It is his birthday after all!”

So take up a new tradition this Christmas: celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ Birthday!  One way we’re doing this is by changing how we spend our money at Christmas.  Most of us spend way more than we even have to spend.  We go into debt to have the “traditional” Christmas.  New rule: don’t go into debt to celebrate Jesus’ birthday!  Rather, make this commitment: give away as much as you spend on Christmas.  For some of you that means simply being more generous at Christmas.  For others it means cutting your spending in half.

We’re going to give you an opportunity on Christmas Eve to give away as much as you spend on yourself.  Usually our offerings all year long go to supporting the immediate mission and ministry of SCC, but at Christmas Eve we receive an offering and give it all away.  This year we’re giving it all away to our medical missions in Nicaragua.  Twice a year we send teams to Nicaragua to bring life-giving and life-changing medicine, medical expertise, and hope to individuals all across the second poorest country in the Americas.

Over the life of our church we’ve been able to give away over $31,000 in our Christmas Eve offerings.  Last year we gave away $3800.  Our record is $5800 in 2011.  I’d love to see us smash that record this year.  Can we do $6000?  No, that’s too low.  Let’s shoot for $10,000.  Come on, if we give away as much as we spend at Christmas, we can easily do $10,000.  Get your family and friends in on it.  Give them an invite card to join you for Christmas Eve (one service at 5PM at Lansing Christian School and one service at 7PM at Jackie’s dinner with a $10 Christmas dinner), and tell them not to spend any money on you but to give it to our Christmas Eve offering.  Now that’s a miracle!

During Christmas we’re not only focusing on giving overseas, but we’re also giving away lots of money locally.  This is the last year in a three-year capital campaign at SCC to save money for a building.  When we began the campaign we decided to tithe on what we received for the capital campaign, so we’ve been setting aside 10% for missions.  We’ve received about $330,000 so we’ve set aside $33,000 for missions.  Half of that is going to our medical missions in Nicaragua and half of it is staying here locally.  Part of the local money is going to the ministries and missions that our church’s small groups have committed to.  So over the course of December, each of our small groups is getting a $1000 check to give to their local charity.  We’re going to show you a video each week of that miraculous moment when someone from our church gets to give $1000 to a ministry they’ve been volunteering at for a long time.  You’re not going to want to miss that!  That’s what your giving does.  It changes lives both here in SCC, in our community, and our world.  Here’s a miracle for Holt Senior Care:

*This series and sermon are inspired by Mike Slaughter’s book, Christmas Is Not Your Birthday.