Among the Gifts of Christmas

When any of us takes a moment to remember and reflect, chances are we can think of gifts along the way that were given to us at Christmas that impacted us in important ways. I can still remember my first (and only) electric train and an old black and white photo of my Dad helping me put it together on the living room floor on a Christmas morning long ago.

I can remember sitting in the airport in Cincinnati in the wee hours of a morning waiting to fly home for Christmas. Vicki had given me a battery operated, digital calculator that could do basic math – addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It was a pretty impressive little device in 1973 – especially for a guy whose high school business classes had business machines that could multiply and divide, but to accomplish that task for a fairly simple equation, it took several minutes of some mechanical processes going on that were slow and noisy. But this little calculator – hand-held calculator – could do more complex equations instantly.

Then there is the cross-stitched version of the Greek text of Philippians 2:5 from a student secretary over thirty years ago that still hangs in a prominent place on my office wall.  On that same wall is my favorite Bonhoeffer quote in beautiful calligraphy, a gift from my oldest daughter. And I still think about that cold February Saturday morning where, as a part of a tour, I was able to walk through the dugout and on to the turf of Turner Field, thanks to a Christmas gift from my youngest daughter and her husband.

I understand that often the idea of “gift giving” becomes more “what am I going to get?” than “what can I give?” but I’m not sure all the bashing that goes on about allowing Christmas to be a time of giving to others is exactly the message the world needs to hear from believers. I also understand that sometimes the gift giving thing gets out of hand – I’ve probably been guilty of that myself. But there has to be a better way to address that problem than the blanket condemnation we hear sometimes!

What we must remember is that Among the Gifts of Christmas, is not only the rather extravagant gift of God’s becoming a human to redeem us; but also the gift of calling those who follow Jesus to live an incarnational life as the body of Christ in this world.

John (1:1-14) reminds us that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God” and that “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” And Paul, writing to believers in Philippi, (Philippians 2:5-11) tells us of one who “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”

That gift – a gift described as one from which “we have all received grace upon grace” (John 1:16) – means that God would “rescue us from the power of darkness and transfer us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Colossians 1:13,14) That transfer is so real, that Paul can say of his own life as a prisoner on behalf of Gentiles who now follow Jesus, “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” (Colossians 1:24)

Among the blessed gifts of Christmas – the most extravagant of the extravagant – is the reality that in God’s coming in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, He makes it possible for you and me – the body of Christ – to continue to be Jesus to the world. No mere metaphor, the idea of the church as the body of Christ is our incarnational mission to the world.

During this blessed season of Christmas, may we all proclaim a message of “grace upon grace” with the promise of rescue and transfer.