What is Christmas?

Rev. Clevis O. Laverty
December 23, 1956

[Note: These sermons have been typed out in two forms: a rough, but complete, draft, and notes for delivering the sermon without reading it. In the case of this sermon, the draft and the notes diverge. The different aspects in the notes are in italics.]

What is Christmas? What does Christmas mean to you? What does Christmas mean to me? Here we have been celebrating this day for 2000 years. It has stood the test of time. It must mean something. It must have some real significance.

Sure it is an easy question to answer. I don't need preacher to tell me. Everybody knows that Christmas is Santa Claus and lights. It is holly on the mantle, mistletoe for the unwary, and stockings by the chimney. Sure, it's baby dolls, electric trains, and cowboy suits under the tree by the window. And it's candlelight service at the church, and choirs singing carols. I know what Christmas is.

But when you open the good Book and read the story of the event that gave us Christmas, those things are not mentioned. You find that it is something else. What do you find? I just read it a few minutes ago. Your found a man and woman on their way into town to sign up for taxes—that is not new. You found them going to a hotel where they were unable to get a room—that is not new. Your found a woman giving birth to a child—that is nothing unusual either.

But as we read on, something new was added. We found an angel, and you don't bump into an angel every day. In addition, this particular angel speaks of good news.

Now that is worth stopping to think about. We are in the habit of expecting bad news, and this was an announcement of good news, the good news that this little baby who was born in a stable was the answer to their prayers. Then all of a sudden, there was a whole chorus of angels singing “Glory to God” and that my friends is Christmas. The proclamation that something extra had been added: heaven on earth and the Word had been made flesh. It is sure a lot more than jingle bells and tinsel and a pile of packages. It is the good news that God is good and came to tell us so.

Now these people in that far away day knew that God was above them. They had learned to look up and to believe that he was head man. They had accepted the Ten Commandments as his law, and they sang songs of their delivery across the Red Sea and through the wilderness to the Promised Land. They sang songs that the “Lord God is a great God” and “The Lord is good.”

But, this was something else—this babe born in the manger of the Virgin is God with us. They came to look and what a God he turned out to be. They had learned that God was above them, now they found out he was the kind of a person they would like to have beside them. I have been told that sympathy is two hearts tugging away at the same load. Now we know that regardless of the load, God is at hand ready to help us pull. That is Christmas.

A man once told a nine-year-old boy that he would give him an orange if the boy would tell him where God is. The boy said: “I'll give you two oranges if you will tell me where he isn't” That is Christmas.

A man was once riding horseback through the Virginia countryside and came to a cabin. He knocked on the door and a Negro woman answered. He asked who lived there and she answered: “Nobody but me and Jesus.” That is Christmas.

An elderly preacher once told another man no longer too young that if the call was in his heart to preach the gospel, that regardless how impossible the attainment appeared to be, he too could become a Christian minister. Friends, that is Christmas too.

There is another story I would like to relate to you. Sir Robert Scott set out to find the South Pole, and he found it only to discover that Amundsen was there ahead of him. He turned back and started for home but he never arrived. One after another, he and the whole party died out there in that frozen country.

Months later when rescuers found Scott's tent, they found his diary. Almost the last entry had been written by obviously frozen fingers when he and only one other were left. This was the entry:

As we sit here in this barren waste, we think of home and those we love. Yet we are cheered, for it seems there are three of us here, not just two. It is Jesus, and his presence that comforts us. All along he seems to have journeyed with us.