Pastor’s Page
Volume 12 Week 51
Ten Things that Make You Go
Hmmm!
There's Wonder and Mystery
at Christmas! Enjoy the Wonder!
I’m typing “wonderment” just to see.. Yep! It passed spell check on my computer. I’m glad wonderment is an officially recognized word because it’s such a big part of what Christmas is all about. With just a week to go before our remembrance of this great mystery, that God came near us, I hope you’ve already had a chance to wonder. There are so many reasons to stop and say, “Wow, Lord. That’s so amazing. Something is happening here in this story and something is happening to me.”
Wonderment is what happens when, as we’re going through our ordinary routines of our ordinary lives, and suddenly something amazing, something mysterious happens that causes us to stop and reflect and recognize that there is a lot more happening around us than we should expect or that we can explain.
I’ve listed some of my favorite wonderments of this holy season. I hope one or two of them will give you reason to pause and wonder, reason to think of God’s goodness and His mysterious working in your life. I’m sure you could list many more. I’ve kept my list to ten, and they’re in pretty random order, except for maybe number one.
Here we go: ten reasons to pause and wonder this Christmas.
10. Angels!
Our
unseen friends, our fellow faithful worshipers of the almighty Lord, are
everywhere in this story, specifically mentioned four times as they appear to
Zechariah, Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds, so you know they are up to a lot
more than we see. Did they help lead the
way to the place of Jesus’ birth? How
many times did they assist the travelers from
Doesn’t it make you wonder how many times an angel has come alongside you this week? Or how many are sitting in the pews with us during worship? Or how many of those random chance holiday encounters with someone we haven’t seen in a long time were directed in part by angels? It’s wonderment!
9. Recitation!
I can’t help but pray for the children when I see them leading worship, especially as they recite their parts in the Christmas story. I pray that the words of recitation planted in their hearts over the couple weeks of preparation will sink in deeply, so that at some point, maybe later in junior high, maybe in an armored personnel carrier in a field of battle, maybe awaiting a doctors report outside an operating room, or maybe while lying uncomfortably in a nursing home many years from now, those words will rise up in blessing. “Fear not, for I bring you tidings of great joy!” God’s word of promise is a wonder.
8. Cookies!
It’s a wonder to me that they taste better and better every year, and also that after all these years I don’t know enough to stop eating after just one or two or seven. There are Christmas cookies in heaven, aren’t there?
7. Inexhaustible Word!
A fellow once remarked to the Pastor at the church door, “You know, if you’d get a new topic, maybe I’d come to church more than once a year?” I can’t help it, because the topic is inexhaustible. I’ve been at this for a few years, always preaching at least once on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. Sometimes I write three sermons in two days and squeeze in a couple Pastor’s Pages along the way, and I never run out of things to talk about.
The story of the Nativity of our Lord has more facets than the Hope Diamond and the more we ponder and study the amazing events surrounding Jesus’ birth, the more ways we find to tell the good news that Jesus has come and will come again. God’s word is alive and His Holy Spirit will always give us something new to consider, an new reason for wonderment.
6. Gifts!
As a child, I don’t think I ever really got the point of the gifts. I remember my mother wrapping the boxes we used each year in the Sunday School pageant, and maybe even being given the job of walking down the aisle in may bathrobe with a shoebox covered in gold paper and a big shiny broach, but I didn’t know how that mattered to the baby.
It’s a double wonderment to me now. I see the mystery and the wonder first of all in the worship and adoration of the Magi as the present their gifts to the newborn king. And I see wonder in the exchange of gifts between friends and family who sought to find the perfect expressions of their love for one another. I know exactly why I keep the gifts my children brought me when they were small. Wonderment.
5. The Star!
See last
week’s Pastor’s Page. Whether the star
was a mysterious, miraculous heavenly guide or it can be explained as a natural
phenomenon, the star of
4. Decorations!
I could spend the whole Page trying to explain this one. What is it that causes us to go to such lengths to make the world sparkle and shine and glimmer with light and color and ribbon and bow? Wonderment. The decorations and wrappings and sequined slippers are an outward expression of the feeling we have deep inside that there is reason to hope and rejoice and celebrate. Look at the lights. See the angels. Worship the Lord!
3. Faith!
Mary and
Joseph heard from the angel, and their hearts were set at rest. What was unexplainable, impossible,
ridiculous was true. God was at work. They accepted it as true. They followed where he led. The shepherds heard the report and ran to
2. Tears!
Somewhere this Christmas a tear, more than one really, will be shed as Christmas is celebrated without he presence of a beloved, but the light from the tree will cast a sparkle of the light of hope that we have that because Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem, we will meet again by His side.
And in the quiet of the soft singing of Silent Night, a tear will roll down many a cheek, a sign of the overflow of wonderment.
1. Incarnation!
“When the right time had fully come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law” (Galatians 4:4). There is no greater mystery in all the world. Jesus loves you.
Enjoy the wonder!