Christmas Expectations

Christmas Eve was a wonderful yet crazy day for me.  Two worship services at 5 & 10, parents in town and I'm still coughing some - actually to the point that during the 5pm service I had to take an intermission during the sermon in order to drink some water to help with my cough.  

Below is my Christmas Eve sermon.  What are some of your Christmas expectations and your expectations for God?

There are a lot of expectations around Christmas.  We have expectations about what food we are going to eat.  About whose home we are going to.  We have expectations about what gifts we are going to get and the reactions from people who we bought gifts for.  We have expectations about the music we will hear.  The kids here are expecting there to be presents from Santa under their Christmas tree tomorrow and they are expecting toys and not clothes. 

Most of these expectations are because of traditions.  We based our expectations based on what we have done in previous years, the memories we hold most dear.  So what are some of your expectations for Christmas? 

Don’t you just love traditions?  They help form our expectations, but we have also made expectations because we make Christmas to be this picture prefect time of the year.  It is the most wonderful time of the year! And yet so often our expectations are not met. The cookies did not turn out exactly like how grandma used to make them.  The family gets in a big fight after dinner (and yet somehow we forgot that we actually have this fight every year).  We don’t receive the gift we were expecting or someone doesn’t like the gift we bought them as much as we thought.  A loved one is not able to make it home for Christmas. 

We even have these expectations with God.  We expect to come to worship and sing all the carols that we know and love.  We expect to have candlelight during Silent Night.  We expect to hear the story of Jesus’ birth.  And hopefully thus far we have meet those expectations. 

And yet we expect to go home, unchanged.  Maybe with some warm fuzzies or good memories, maybe with our favorite carol stuck in our head, but we don’t expect to be greatly changed by the experience.  But yet Jesus changes everything!

The shepherds weren’t expecting angels to come to them in the fields.  Mary wasn’t expecting to give birth in a stable.  Joseph wasn’t expecting to have a son who was not actually his.  And yet with Jesus’ birth all these things happened.

We don’t expect God to be a baby and yet in Jesus birth, God is there. We don’t expect the infinite God to become finite and yet in Jesus’ birth God is made flesh and blood.  We don’t expect the God of heaven to come down to earth and yet on Christmas God was made flesh.  We don’t expect the lowliest people hear this news first yet the angels came to proclaim Jesus’ birth to the shepherds instead of kings.  We don’t expect to see God in our daily lives and yet because of Jesus’ birth Christ lives in each of us.  We don’t expect that God would be willing to die for us and yet in Jesus a savior was given to us that loves us so much he died for us.  We don’t expect that God to come to us and yet in Christ, Emmanuel God is with us, here and out there in each and every day of our lives because Christ comes to us not just on Christmas but always, constantly.  And for that reason, maybe we should change our expectations, because Jesus changes everything.