Christmas is coming!  As we journey through the season of Advent, we look forward to this special day.  Every year it comes:  a day for family and feasting, for gifts and celebrations, for reflection and thanksgiving and prayer.  We prepare with strings of lights, scented candles, crisp cookies, shopping trips, and airline tickets.  We fill the air with songs and laughter as we revel in the cold, starry nights of the new winter.  It is part of the rhythm of our days, this Christmas that comes every year, every December twenty-fifth.

         But December was not always a time of happy preparation.  Many generations of God’s faithful people endured the winter darkness, longing for a day when God’s Messiah would come to bring them light.  They prayed for an Advent of  hope and peace and joy, for the arrival of God’s promised redeemer.  The centuries passed, but they did not lose hope.  Still they awaited that promised coming, dreaming their dream of peace down through the years.

Music:         Dream a Dream

         They wrote of their dreams, those prophets long ago.  They looked around them and saw that their world was not what it should be.  God’s people had been called to care for each other and their world, but strife and greed and hatred divided them and nearly destroyed them.  Their prophets saw the sinfulness of their own people and saw all too well the results of that sin:  children starved, the innocent suffered, the guilty became richer and more greedy.  The world’s journey seemed to lead to a truly dead end.

         What could be the answer to this dream turned nightmare?  Was there a way for God to look upon his people’s sin and yet redeem it?  Could the cry of a hungry baby, born in a stable, be God’s answer to his people’s hunger for salvation?

Music:  Child of Joy and Peace

         So it was God fulfilled the dream in the strangest way, in the birth of a child born in poverty.  What an unexpected journey it had been, from a world created good, then inhabited by humans who sinned and failed their God and harmed each other!  And now that sad world was about to be redeemed in the most surprising way!

         The place was humble enough:  a stable in a small town in an out-of-the way Roman territory.  Few knew its name, and fewer still would have journeyed there.  Yet on that long-ago night all creation turned to that little place.  Wind and stars and earth, beasts of field and forest, all creation gathered around the small miracle who lay in a straw-filled bed.  They journeyed to an insignificant place to sing a lullaby to the most significant baby ever born.

Music:  Christ’s Lullaby

         So all creation journeyed into that first Christmas night, and the very stars sang their praises to the infant redeemer born in Bethlehem.  But more humble ones journeyed there, too, and stood as awed witnesses to God’s amazing grace in that place.

         Joseph had journeyed there with Mary, his betrothed, in humble obedience to the words of an angel who came to him in a dream and changed his life forever.  How strange it all must have seemed to him! How improbable and odd, that the young woman he intended to marry would become the mother of one born to save his people from their sins!  And yet, at journey’s end that night, as he gazed down at this newborn child he knew would be named Jesus, suddenly the dream and the promise and the journey were all very real and very immediate, in the weight of a little boy he cradled in his arms.  And so he joined his human voice in the songs of welcome for this child.

Music:  Joseph’s Lullaby

         That night the long journey of faith reached a moment of light and grace and truth.  In silence and in angel’s song alike the proclamation was made:  God had heard the prayers of generations of faith, and God came in person to answer.

         That night the very darkness and quiet of midnight was made holy.    No other night, before or since, has been like it.  A baby unlike any other was born to a mother unlike any other.  The most unlikely company of witnesses gathered there:  glorious angels and lowly shepherds, a bewildered but loving fiancé, and, later, splendid scholar-kings from a distant Eastern land.  What a wonderful and amazing night that first Christmas turned out to be! On that night, in the midst of darkness, the pure light of love shone out of a bleak stable.

Music:  Silent Night

         So many journeyed to Bethlehem because of that night’s birth.  Mary and Joseph came in trust that God’s purpose would be accomplished in them.  The shepherds came in curiosity and awe at the angel’s proclamation.  The Eastern scholars came in wise response to a new star in the sky.  All came to Bethlehem thinking that their journey’s end was there, expecting to find what they were seeking in that particular place and time.

         And yet: their journey did not end in Bethlehem.  True, they found the promised Savior, the baby in the manger.  But for Mary and Joseph, as with all parents, the birth was only the beginning of a journey of years.  For the shepherds, they found the baby and returned to their flocks, but they gave praise and thanks to God for the rest of their lives.  For the wise men, they made a homeward journey full of wonder and newfound faith in a God they had never known before.  All of them journeyed to Bethlehem, but when they left, they journeyed on, as well.

Music:  Journey On

         And so it is for us.  We journey to Christmas, and delight in the day when it comes, but if our journey ends on that one day, it has been for nothing.  Our Christmas journey must be a journey that lasts our whole life through, a journey of dreams continually dreamed, of hope continually hoped, of love continually expressed in service to the Lord who came to us in love.  It is a journey that goes on forever, in this life and in the life to come.

         This Christmas, may it happen for you, too!  Let the glory and joy the world witnessed at that first Christmas take you onward in your life.  Journey on, proclaiming glory to God and joy to the world.  For the Lord has come, and always comes, to those who journey in faith with him.  Glory to God in the highest, and joy to the world he redeems!

Music:  Joy to the World/Glory to God