175 A New Noel

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “A New Noel”, originally shared on December 23, 2021. It was the 175^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   “Jesus is the reason for the season” it’s been said. But will we encounter Christ at Christmas this year? Will Christmas be more than a secular holiday? How do we proclaim a new noel? Today, we’re going to find out.

   We were at Target in San Dimas last Tuesday and I sneaked into the Christmas Cards section to find a card for Sally. The Christmas Card section took the entire side of an aisle in the cards section, right in front. I looked through the section from one end to the other. Twice. I could not find one card with a religious Christmas theme. Not one.

   It wasn’t like, OK it was four days before Christmas and there were lots of blank slots, maybe from the religious ones. There were two that I recall. There just weren’t any Christmas cards with a Christmas message.

   We had looked for boxed Christmas cards earlier in the season and there were only a few that even by a stretch could be said to have a remotely Christian message.

   What does that say about the state of Christmas in our culture?

   We are still in Advent, and I guess I’m doing a little Ad-venting again this year, but I wonder if it means that the Church has so small a footprint in our culture that a mega-retailer like Target sees no market for a Christian message at Christmas. None.

   I’m not mad at Target. That’s not where the fault lies. They study their markets. They know what sells and what doesn’t, what’s good for the company and what isn’t.

   I’m deeply disappointed in the Christian Church that has for decades made the Christian message into a motif, a tradition, an institution devoid of any spiritual power.

   You’ll find churches that are social clubs, political organizations, service clubs, guardians of tradition, and social justice groups that use religious language but only to project a public image or to harness the power of our numbers.

   They want to convince us that our only hope for relevance is to conform to the values of this world. And when we do, we one day wake up on Christmas and find that we are not different than our culture and have no purpose in it whatsoever.

   These cannot harness our real power, though. No one can control the Holy Spirit.

   It’s hard to find a church whose focus is on the leadership of the Holy Spirit to receive new life in Jesus Christ, to the already inbreaking but not yet perfected reign of God, to the need for repentance from the old life, and a turning to the redemptive and transformational new life in a living relationship with the one true living God.

   I saw a tweet the other day from a mother who told about how she had been in a coffee shop recently when a barista announced that an order was ready by calling out, “Mary”. The mother’s four-year-old didn’t miss a beat and shouted, “Full of grace, the Lord is with you!”

   The mother said that her order was called next, and she quickly collected it and left in embarrassment and laughter.

   It is kind of funny, but it’s also sad that it’s funny. Why not be proud that a full-throated Advent proclamation is remembered and proclaimed without hesitation by a four-year-old? It comes from Luke 1:26-28, which in the New Revised Standard Version, proclaims,

26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”

   This reminds me of the meme I saw this year that shows a singer performing the popular Christian song, “Mary, Did You Know?”, and Mary inserting the answer, “Well, yeah. The angel Gabriel told me.”

   When even people in popular Christian music miss the message, we have a problem.

   I’m a big advocate for “Fix the problem not the blame.” And, having Ad-vented a little bit, I wonder how can we fix the problem?

   Is it time for a new focus? Is it time for us to concentrate on the message and not the packaging for a while? Is it time for us to care less about the popularity of our message and more on its impact? Is it time to focus less on “Come to my church” and more on “Come meet Jesus?”

   There are people in our culture who don’t know what Christmas is about and their numbers are rising. Perhaps that’s a place to start, as in “’What I am I doing for Christmas?’ Well, we’ll be going to church. Have you ever heard why we celebrate Christmas? It’s quite a story.”

   I suppose it’s not surprising that more and more people don’t know the story of Jesus birth or the reason for it. Generations are being raised without any real knowledge of what Christianity is about, and it shows in their often incredible and unfortunate ignorance, especially among those who raise criticisms of Christianity, and even among active members of Christian churches.

   I remember reading a posting years ago from a pastor who was a Presbyterian, I think. He said that a member of the church he served had told him that she had gone to the jewelry department of a big box store to buy a Baptism gift for her niece. She asked the young woman at the counter if she had any silver cross necklaces. “Sure,” the clerk said. “Do you want the kind with the little man on it or the kind without?” I don’t think that things have improved much since then.

   Invite someone to come to church with you or to watch it online and then to talk about it with you. This year, as concerns about the rapid spread of the Omicron variant rise, some may opt to watch it at home. That may be an even more attractive option for people who have never been to a Christian worship service, or haven’t been for a while, or have weird beliefs about what actually happens at worship in Christian communities.

   Maybe it’s time for a New Noel. “Noel” is a word that means Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ, in songs and in art. It came to the English language from the French and into the French language from the Latin word, “natalis”.

   “Natalis” according to mirriam-webster.com can mean "birthday" as a noun or "of or relating to birth" as an adjective.

   “Natalis” is where our word “natal” comes from. Your natal town is the town where you were born.  Pre-natal care is the care a woman receives before giving birth. The natal star is the one the wisemen saw indicating the birth of Jesus.

   Christmas is about the birth of Jesus. Maybe that message will be the means by which people open their hearts to receive the presence of God this year. Will there be room? And how will things change for those who do?

   In Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, he says in John 3:5-8,

5 Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

   God transforms lives. They are so changed that it is like being born again, or born from above, from God. We don’t see the wind. We see the effect of the wind on things. We don’t see God, we see the effect of God on people.

   And people become a new creation, like a baby, brand new. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17,

17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

   It’s almost Christmas and we have good news! Life can change for the better. The deepest darkness is overcome by the light. Christ is born! Our redemption is nearer now that when it was first proclaimed!

   Remember the “Keep Christ in Christmas” campaigns? Maybe we’ve come to the point that we need a “Restore Christ to Christmas” effort.

   We now await the second coming, the second “advent” of Jesus to bring the new heaven and new earth. But for the coming of the first advent, the birth of God made flesh in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human being, the waiting is over. It’s what we celebrate at Christmas.

   No one has to wait for God to live in them, for Christ to be born in you. Let’s invite people to open their hearts to receive the transformational presence of God, to come and know Jesus.

   Let’s encourage people to expect something to actually happen this Christmas, and hope in the Lord so that they might return home like the shepherds who encountered the infant Jesus, in Luke 2:20,

20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

   Let’s come to Christmas with a new focus on the awe and wonder of it. Let us be reflectors of the light that is Jesus Christ, share the Good News of new life, and bring a focus on Jesus this Christmas, the light that has overcome the darkness, and points us to our new birth in a New Noel.