(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Cut Flowers or New Life”, originally shared on December 23, 2025. It was the 390th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Christmas is a time of death and life. Which one will it be for you this
week?
The darkest day of
the year has just passed, and we’re now celebrating the birth of Jesus, the
light of the world. Can we value the light without knowing the darkness, the
absence of light?
We haven’t had much
rain so far this season, but rain is predicted for Christmas this year. It’s a
blessing. It will help everything that is alive in Southern California to live.
Can we appreciate the rain without first knowing the death that comes without
it?
Christmas will be celebrated at
worship this year, at Christ Mass. It will focus on the good news to every
person who is dead, or has been dead, inside. Can we appreciate the birth of
Christ without knowing what life would be without Him?
The story from Luke 2:1-20
will be read in churches and in homes. It will be read in parks, and on the
streets, and in places that have no names. It will answer those questions.
Churches will be decorated in
white, for the purity of the baby Jesus and for the swaddling cloths with which
he was wrapped by his mother, Mary. Newborn babies were typically rubbed with
salt and wrapped tightly with cloth and strips of cloth so that the itchiness
of the salt would make them struggle against the cloth. It was believed that
that would make the baby strong.
Christmas reminds us that
Christians are not exempt from struggle either, but that God has won the
ultimate battle for us, and that that victory began with Jesus’ birth.
Churches will be filled with
flowers to celebrate the occasion and to honor the Christ child. They will look
pretty, but they will be dead. They will still have the appearance of the life
they had when they were rooted in the source of their life, when they were
planted in good soil and watered. But, as decorations, they will be cut off
from their source of that life. Some flowers will even be artificial and will
never have been alive at all.
Poinsettia plants will last a
little longer. Decorating with potted poinsettia plants at Christmas comes from
the Mexican legend of a poor girl named Pepita. She didn’t have enough money to
buy a gift for the baby Jesus at her church’s Christmas celebration, but her
cousin told her that Jesus would be happy with any gift she brought, so she
picked a handful of weeds on her way to church for Christmas and laid them at
the base of the Nativity scene and, suddenly, they were changed into beautiful
red flowers.
The first U.S. ambassador to
Mexico, Joel Poinsett, brought them to the U.S. in the early 1800’s and the
poinsettia plant was named after him. Their festive red and green colors
matched what had been a pagan holiday color combination.
One hundred years later an
entrepreneur started sending them to TV stations free of charge to use in their
Christmas specials and they became wildly popular.
Sales and marketing made
poinsettias the flowers of Christmas, so they would be the perfect
symbol of our secular Christmas celebrations. And, in fact, their sap and
flowers are mildly toxic.
Except that their star
shaped flowers suggest the Star of Bethlehem, their red color suggests the
blood of Christ on the cross, and they come into bloom in December, which is
when we celebrate the birth of Jesus.
So which Christmas are you
celebrating this week? The celebration of the secular commercial Christmas and
the inevitability of death, or the Christian celebration of the free gift of
eternal life for all people who believe in God made flesh in Jesus Christ and
are baptized?
Will you be a part of a church culture,
a social service advocacy group, a friendly family, a place where members are
only valued as people who can boost the numbers, help pay the bills, maintain
the building, and contribute to established member’s dreams of the past, to
maintain their legacy, a place that looks like a church but is cut off at its
roots and is dead already?
Or will you be a part of a
church that is filled with new life, a Christian community that is
planted in the good soil of the Word of God, fed in Holy Communion, and watered
by Baptism for the eternal life of all who have received God’s gift of faith in
Jesus Christ and are saved to serve others?
The Christmas story comes to all
people as Good News.
We are all naturally
like cut flowers. We are cut off from God.
We are all naturally
like poinsettias. We can live for a while if we are cared for, and longer if we
are planted in the ground, while still being mildly toxic.
Our own efforts to save our
lives will not help us.
We don’t need to be made
better. We need a savior, or we will die.
And so we celebrate Christmas
the birth of Jesus so that all may be born again.
Christmas is about birth, not
death, new life not poison; it’s about the beginning and about our restoration,
about a new life with the one true living God. It’s about the birth of our
Savior, Jesus Christ.
Mary, the mother of
Jesus, was a young woman, unmarried in a Patriarchal culture, in Israel, an
almost unknown country to the world. It was occupied by the Roman Empire, which
was just the most recent of many empires that had occupied Israel for almost
1,000 years. Life expectancy was short, so girls would get married as soon as
they were able to bear children. Mary could have been as young as 12 years old.
Mary was pregnant, and Joseph, who had a
legal relationship with Mary that was not yet marriage, knew that he was not
the baby’s father. In those days, Joseph could have had Mary put to death for
the shame she had brought upon them and their families. But Joseph who, like
Mary, had been visited by an angel (a messenger from God) believed that Mary, a
virgin, had been made pregnant by the will of God.
Just then, everyone in the country was
ordered to go to their family’s ancestral city of origin in order to be
registered by the occupying Roman Empire. The Romans wanted to make sure that
everybody was paying their taxes!
Mary and Joseph traveled the 90 miles to
Joseph’s family town of Bethlehem, the city of his ancestor King David, by
donkey and on foot, in Mary’s ninth month of pregnancy. They arrived and found
that people coming into town from all over the country had taken all the rooms.
It’s almost inconceivable, though, that
Joseph’s relatives couldn’t have found someplace for them. But the
out-of-wedlock pregnancy had shamed the family.
So, it was not likely that there was no room
for them in the inn, but that there was no room for THEM in the inn, or
anywhere else with the family.
They found some shelter in an enclosure for
animals and, having no place to put her baby, Mary wrapped him in tight bands
of cloth and laid him in the container from which the animals ate their food.
This is how God, who created everything that
exists from nothing as an act of God’s will, was born as Jesus, who was fully
God and fully a human being.
We celebrate Christmas because the common
relationship we have with God, given to all people who will receive it, began
in a barn with the birth of Jesus Christ.
The Christmas story ends with Jesus being given a name, in Luke 2:21,
21After eight days had
passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name
given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
But why does his name matter? And why the name “Jesus”? Wouldn’t a rose
by any other name smell just as sweet?
Well, there are thousands of people who get paid big bucks because the
answer is no, it would not.
There are hosts of marketers whose job it is to sell things by
giving them names that would be attractive to consumers, like those who made
the poinsettia the flower of Christmas.
Names are important, but they were even more important in Bible times,
in both the Old and the New Testament times.
When we think of how to describe a human being’s true self, we
may use the words like their “heart” or their “soul” or their “spirit”. But in
Bible times people would say it was in a person’s name.
“Jesus” is a masculine given name derived from the name “Joshua”. In
Hebrew the name Jesus is “Y’shua”, and it means “The Lord is salvation” i.e.
“Savior”. The word “Christ” is a Greek, then Latinized, version of the word
“Messiah”, the deliverer promised by God’s prophets for 1,000 years. So, “Jesus
Christ” means “Jesus the Savior, the Messiah”. His name is who He is for
you and for the world.
Christmas reminds us that we have all been
named with the same name.
We are a new creation in Jesus Christ. We
are “Christ”ians, and have been transformed. We celebrate Christmas as a
day that began the salvation of our true selves for which the baby Jesus grew
up to die.
The Christmas
message of the angel is the same message to you today, and to everyone you
know, in Luke 2:10-11,
10 But the angel said to them,
“Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the
people: 11 to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior,
who is the Messiah, the Lord.
Make this Christmas
be the time for you to receive and to proclaim the Good News of restored life
that our Savior Jesus Christ was born in order to die so that all people who
believe and baptized will receive life in his Name.
Jesus is the reason
for the Season. Jesus has reconnected us to God, the source of eternal life.
Alleluia! Live from the inside out in that New Life. Amen!
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