LESSONS: Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-20

TITLE: Fulfillment

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  1. A Christmas Story (1)

An old piano man ran his fingers up and down the keys of a run-down instrument. He sang a few sad notes to himself. It was Christmas Eve and old Amos was feeling pretty sad. He was all alone, with nowhere to go. He once had a wife and a beautiful little girl but somehow they slipped out of his life.

While walking through the streets of downtown he saw a small girl standing in front of a department store window. The little girl was looking at a display of the Christmas story.

The decorators had spared no expense in creating the scene--a marble pillared inn, an immaculate manger made of finished hardwoods, and a stable of solid polished mahogany.

As the girl stood and stared at the display, a security guard chased her away. The little girl began to cry. Old Amos came over to her.

"I just wanted to see the baby," the girl kept repeating over and over.

"That's not the way they looked," Amos said. "Let me show you how it really was."

In another section of the city Amos gathered some of his friends. Together they recreated the Christmas story for the little girl.

"When the baby Jesus was born," said Amos, "it wasn't in front of a great big inn with marble columns. And the crib wasn't sitting under a polished mahogany stable...It was in front of a crumbling-down hotel, and the stable wasn't much different from [this] old streaky awning hanging over the sidewalk."

The little girl watched in awe as Amos' friends acted out the Christmas drama. So did other passers-by who stopped to watch.

"Angel," Amos whispered to the child, "the Baby Jesus is one of us. Don't you ever let anybody make you feel different...He walked the same kind of road we walk. From now on wherever you go, you just remember he's walking right there with you, and there ain't nothing the two of you can't handle."

Amos and his friends brought the story of Christmas alive for this small child. The wonder she felt must have been something like the feeling Mary had when an angel spoke to her in that first Christmas drama.

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  1. The security guard did not want the girl standing in front of the Christmas display.

    1. She was not good enough.

    2. She was not dressed up enough.

    3. She did not fit his idea of who ought to be standing in front of the window.

    4. The security guard did not understand the Christmas story that each of us is beautiful in our own way.

      1. Beautiful in its own way: (2)

        2. Out in Kansas they have opened Christmas tree farms. Farms that grow Christmas trees. It has been done for years in Wisconsin and Michigan...but in Kansas it's a new business. It was the first year that the trees were ready. The farmer did not have any connections with the big tree cutters, so he decided to open the fields to the local people. The people could pick their very own tree, cut it, and get it a lot cheaper than buying it at the Christmas tree lots in town.

        So one Sunday afternoon, a family went to the farm. Twenty acres of firs. The father told his daughter to go out and look at the trees, and the tree she wanted, she could have. It took a long time to look at 5 acres of trees. Many there were very nice, but there was one tree, about as tall as the girl, and the tree was ugly. There were missing branches. It was gangly...and that was the tree the little girl chose.

        The father said, "Honey, are you sure? Look, you can have any tree you want, I don't care what it cost, I want you to have the tree you want."

        The girl went back up the hill and looked at all the trees. Another 30 minutes passed when the little girl came back. She said, "Yes, this is the tree I want." So the farmer gave the man a saw and they cut the tree and put it in the car.

        On the way home the father asked the girl why she had chosen that tree. She replied,

        "I chose it because I knew no one else would choose it. No one else would want that tree. I didn't want that tree having people say, "Look, isn't that an ugly tree, isn't that a scrawny tree?" And then she added, "I know that tree will be beautiful when I decorate it...and I love it because it is beautiful in its own way."

      2. Jesus does not choose the beautiful, but the faithful.

        1. What kind of gifts can we give to Jesus?

        2. We return the gift by giving.

  2. We celebrate the receiving and the giving of the love that is ours in Jesus.

    1. Loretta Ross-Gotta has observed: (3)

What if on Christmas Eve people came and sat in the dim pews, and someone stood up and said, Something happened here while we were all out at the malls, while we were baking cookies and fretting about whether we bought our brother-in-law the right gift: Christ was born. God is here! We wouldn't need the glorious choruses and the harp and the bell choir and the organ. We wouldn't need the tree strung with lights. We wouldn't have to deny that painful dissonance between the promise and hope of Christmas and a world wracked with sin and evil. There wouldn't be that embarrassing conflict over the historical truth of the birth stories and whether or not Mary was really a virgin. And no one would have to preach sermons to work up our belief.

All of that would seem gaudy and shallow in comparison to the sanctity of that still sanctuary. And we, hushed and awed by something greater and wiser and kinder than we, would kneel of one accord in the stillness. A peace would settle over the planet like a velvet coverlet drawn over a sleeping child. The world would recollect itself and discover itself held in the womb of the Mother of God. We would be filled with all the fullness of God, even as we filled the emptiness of the Savior's heart with ours.

      1. There is beauty in the creche, the tree, and in this place.

      2. We rejoice once again to celebrate the birth of the Christ-child, Jesus the Christ.

1. THE PIANO MAN'S CHRISTMAS. Ira Williams, Jr. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986, pp. 27-35.

2. Dan Horden, Miami, FL.

3. Loretta Ross-Gotta, To be virgin, Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, Reading for December 6 (Farmington, Pa.: The Plough Publishing House, 2001).

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