A week before Christmas Day I purchased John Grisham's novel, Skipping Christmas, and read it. This year they made it into a movie, though with a different name. If you've not read it, I encourage you to get it and read it just after Thanksgiving. Don't read it now. Wait until December. It will mean more to you.
It is funny and drives home a powerful point. While it is tempting to skip all the festivities and decorating and buying that is associated with Christmas, you can't skip it since Christmas is about relationships with neighbors and family all year long. One thing that struck me in reading this short story is how we tend to forsake the spiritual for the secular. I think we do that partly by packing up Christmas too soon. Most of us are so tired of all the advertising and rushing around that we can't wait until December 26. With all the commercialization today is it any wonder? Sadly, even we in the church may have been tempted to forget and have already forgotten. Forget or forgotten what?
That Christmas is packaged in a Word — a Word that became flesh and lived among us. "And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). John, one of those eyewitnesses to the Word, which is Jesus by the way, wanted his readers to know for certain that God had been in their midst. And was He ever. God had come to humanity as a flesh and blood human being. You can't get more personal than that. It was the fulfillment of what prophets, like Jeremiah, had preached in previous centuries. Such knowledge brought joy to those who heard such powerful words like: "He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:12-13).
Most people sitting in here have received the Christ of Christmas, have believed in His name, and have received the power to become His children — His own flesh and blood. And our lives, hopefully, have been so wrapped up in Christmas that whenever we go into the community, let alone the world, we go with the same knowledge Jeremiah shared with the people of his day centuries before Christ's birth.
Those words from Jeremiah 31 were directed to a people whose lives were wrapped with grief and discouragement. They had lost all as a result of their sinfulness — a sin shrouded in refusal: refusal to obey God. They had been forced by an international power to pack up all, which was very little as a result of the destructive nature of war, and trek hundreds of miles east to a strange land. They were sad. They were despondent. They were pitiful. They were angry. So Jeremiah, that weeping prophet, wept with them and through his tears brought consolation and hope. Jeremiah understood God to have something good on the horizon for them. That is one of the many benefits of being in a relationship with this God of the Hebrews.