It happened in the middle of my thing Monday!

My thing was a speaking and singing gig for the Seniors of First Baptist Springfield. They are so gracious and generous to ask me to participate. We were at the New Ebenezer Retreat Center. The room is large with a post and beam high ceiling and hard surfaces all around. That makes for a bathroom- like sound. That is fun to sing in especially a cappella (without music). So I did.

I began with O Come, O Come Emmanuel (an ancient plainsong) with its haunting melody and in “bathroom” acoustics the sound was good. My outline had developed from my message the Sunday before which included a few songs and some words to connect them and today at Christmas. The songs included O Holy Night, What Child is This and my favorite Do you Hear What I Hear. The story was the juxtaposition between Christmas as we experience it and Christmas as we dream it.

During the message from Sunday I included a clip from the Peanut’s Christmas were Linus recites the Christmas story from Luke 2. It is magical in its simplicity as recorded by Luke of the first Christmas. I think that is what each of us always dreams Christmas will be. It frustrates us when this year like every other year it is not. At the annual Christmas family gathering the tension can be cut with a chain saw. The office “holiday” party is so removed from Christmas that it is hard to tell what season it is. O holy night turns out to be a string of un-holy nights that come more from Hades than heaven. Where is our peanuts Christmas now?

So I turned my talk to the original story of Christmas where an unmarried, unwed girl is pregnant and her fiancé is ready to get rid of her only for God to intervene and tell Joseph the baby is of him. To that mess add a government that requires people to return to their ancestral home to be counted so that their tax may go up. She is pregnant and now having to travel and when they arrive there is no room, closet etc. for them to stay in only a stable/ hole in the ground to sleep and then the baby comes. Great just what they needed a baby, just what we needed, a baby. A moment in the insanity that was their situation where nothing else mattered, a baby was born. THE baby was born. Add to the mess; enter these crazy shepherds into this most private moment of Mary, Joseph and to be named Jesus. How Rude! Until they tell their story and then it’s not rude at all. It is an “ah huh.” Come up close, Joseph gestures and the night continues. That was when it hit me.

Here I was telling the story to this gathered group of senior saints. It was my task to speak to them and God speaks to me through what I was telling them. The original Christmas story is not Peanuts like at all. It more resembles the messed up, hurried up, chaotic lives we lead daily. Into THAT God shows up, God is with us in our mess. That IS the message of Christmas. Here God was showing up in the middle of my thing. Maybe, it wasn’t my thing after all.                  

In HIS Service and Yours,

BroG