Henry had a problem. One day in early December he found himself pressed with too much work and too many deadlines and no time at all to respond to the Christmas letters he was receiving daily from his many friends and business associates. Henry was actually Sir Henry Cole. He was an assistant at the public records office in London, an author of books on art and architecture, a publisher and editor of children’s books, a director of the London Museum, and the founder of the Journal of Design. He also was a close personal friend of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and a major figure in the London social scene, known as one of the most popular party guests around. And so, early in December of 1843, this man with too many friends and too little time had an idea.

Sitting at his desk, he picked up a rigid piece of paper. He began to play with it, folding it this way and that, and as he did so, an old memory popped into his mind. He remembered a school assignment he had received as a young boy, the task of drawing a holiday picture as a present for his parents. He remembered the pictures he and his classmates had drawn, pictures of biblical scenes, red roses, candy, and families celebrating Christmas. And so Henry immediately went to see his friend, the painter John Calcott Horsley. He commissioned Horsley to paint a picture of a happy family and friends celebrating at a festive meal. Henry had this and other drawings printed on 1000 cards of stiff paper, folded them into a little booklet, added the words “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You,” and then he mailed them to his huge list of friends and acquaintances. That is how the Christmas card was born. Within a few years, all of Western Europe had adopted the tradition of sending Christmas cards, and then, through the efforts of a German-born lithographer named Louis Prang, who had moved to Roxbury, Massachusetts before the Civil War, Christmas cards came to the United States. Today, hundreds of millions, and perhaps billions, of cards are sent every Christmas.ⁱ

I don’t really need to describe Christmas cards to you. All of us send them, all of us receive them, all of us fret and sweat until we have ours signed and sealed and stamped and delivered to the post office. There are religious cards, funny cards, generic cards, specialty cards for your wife or husband or mother or father or any of a dozen other special categories of person. But why do we send them at all? There is a bit of social obligation, I suppose, that all of us feel. But the main reason is because we want to be in touch with the people in our lives. At least half of the people on our Christmas card list are folks we actually see only rarely, and some we haven’t seen in years. The yearly card—often with a letter included—is the way we stay in touch, the way we communicate, the way we say to each other, “we still care about you.”

Staying in touch…communicating…saying “I care,” is all part of what the first Christmas was all about, too. And so today I want to talk about the very first Christmas “card” that the Lord God sent to us.

If you have already seen the new movie The Nativity, you will no doubt remember the story told in the opening paragraphs of the Gospel According to Luke. It is the story of Zechariah, a priest in Jerusalem, and his wife, Elizabeth, who was a cousin of Mary, who lived in Nazareth. An angel came to Zechariah and told him that he and his wife were going to have a son, even though the couple was beyond the child-bearing years. Zechariah was skeptical of the angel’s news, and for that skepticism his ability to speak was taken away from him. Elizabeth did indeed become pregnant with a son who, according to the angel, would be the prophetic forerunner of the Messiah. On the eighth day after their child was born, as was the custom, he was circumcised and then named. It was assumed that he would be named Zechariah, after his father, but Elizabeth said no, that he was to be named “John.” Zechariah took a writing tablet and wrote, “His name is John.” Later, the title “the Baptizer,” was given to John. But when Zechariah had named his son, immediately his speech was restored to him. Then, according to Luke, Zechariah was filled with the Spirit of God, and he uttered a hymn of praise to God. That hymn is our scripture lesson for the day, classically called, “The Benedictus,” which is the Latin word for “blessing,” the opening word of the hymn. “Benedictus—blessed—be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them….”

Modern scholars believe that Zechariah’s soliloquy as it is recorded in Luke shows evidence of much editing and development by Jewish Christians in the years following Jesus’ life. It is comprised almost entirely of phrases and thoughts taken from key Old Testament passages. As a priest, Zechariah would have been intimately familiar with these scriptures, and so I find it easy to believe that he is the author of the original, no matter that it may have been edited or developed in later years. The message is the key thing for us today, and that message is very clear. God “has raised up a mighty savior,” “has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,” “has remembered his holy covenant.” God has sent “light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.” Or, to put it in terms you and I can readily understand, God has sent a message to us, in the form of a messenger, who is the Messiah. God wanted to keep in touch, to say he cared. For centuries, God had promised a definitive statement, a final word, so to speak, and now, God was ready to speak that word into the world.

We do need to understand that God already had been communicating with his people for centuries. Zechariah’s speech tells us as much. Zechariah remembers the mighty King David, the greatest of all of Israel’s kings, and the covenant that God made with David and all of David’s posterity. In David’s rule and David’s relationship with God we saw that God was a God of righteousness, of mercy, and of love. Israel had looked to the house of David for centuries for someone who would come to restore the kingdom to its former power and prestige, for someone who would hunger and thirst for God in the same way that David had. Now, that person was coming into the world. Zechariah also remembers the original ancestor, Abraham, and the covenant that God made with Abraham to make of his posterity a great nation, and through that nation, to bless all the peoples of the world. Israel never forgot God’s special promise to Abraham, and even though Israel often turned its back on God, it knew that God never turned his back on them. Israel longed for the leader who would restore the nation to a faithful and righteous stance before God. After Zechariah calls to mind these two towering figures from Israel’s history, he goes on to speak of his son, John, and how John will prepare the people to receive their new king. John will be the final prophet in a long line of prophets, a prophet who will signal that the Messiah is very near. John will preach of the repentance and forgiveness of sin that is necessary as spiritual preparation for the Messiah. John will help the people begin to think of the ultimate issue of their salvation. And then, Zechariah speaks in words that sound strangely like the great prophet Isaiah, saying that God is ready to bring a new light into the world, a light that dispels the fearsome darkness of sin and of death, a light that illuminates the meaning of true righteousness and the possibility of a fulfilling and whole life, a life of shalom, a life of peace.

From the time of Abraham and David, through the time of the prophets, and continuing into the present, God had been proclaiming his love for his people, his desire for them to find the good life by following his laws of righteousness, and his plan to save them from the oblivion of death. But now, in a way like never before, God was coming into the world to speak with final power, final authority, final effect. Look at the amazing words Zechariah uses to describe the meaning and message of the one whom God was sending into the world: redemption, salvation, mercy, rescue, forgiveness, mercy, light, peace. There is no way for you and me to know if Zechariah understood fully just how Mary’s child would fulfill these amazing expectations. That is the story the gospels tell, of how Jesus brought all of these things into the world. But the message is there at the very beginning of the story. Like the words emblazoned on Christmas cards with their wishes for Merry Christmas, peace on earth, and a joyous holiday season, Zechariah’s speech proclaims that in the person and work of the baby who will be born to Mary and Joseph, God is expressing his love for the world. And what God says is not just words printed on a card. What God says is what God actually does. His message of love also is an act of love, love that will begin in a manger, go to a cross, and come out of a tomb.

What God has said and done in the definitive act of coming to us in the form of the man Jesus is only one side of the story, though. A Christmas card means nothing unless it is opened, and then read, and then…believed. Most Christmases, Helen and I are so busy with the season that we only give a cursory glance at the cards we receive, and then we stuff them in a box. After Christmas is over, we take them out, and in the leisure of ample time, we carefully look at each one again, and savor the news and the photographs and the memories and the warm feelings we have for the people whose names are signed at the bottom. An unopened, unread Christmas card is just so much paper. A message is truly a message not just when it is sent, but when it is received.

And so that raises a question about the message God has sent to us. Do we receive him? Do we believe him? There are some people today who do not believe that God exists. They have no answer to the question of from where the universe got its start, but they steadfastly refuse to accept the existence of a Higher Being. Christmas is a very simple pronouncement that there is a God and that this God chose to be born into the world as a human being, fully divine while still fully human. That is what Christmas is about. Accept no substitute interpretations. Christmas is not—first and foremost—about love or family or peace or hope or goodwill. All those things are involved, of course, but only because Christmas is first and foremost about a loving God who expressed that love by sending himself to us to show us the way to have life and to rescue us from death.

I suppose you can read a Christmas card and be unmoved by the fact that someone took the trouble to send it, or by the usual sentiments of love and friendship that they express, either explicitly or implicitly. Simply to receive a card and not be warmed, excited, or encouraged is not really to experience the message at all. Some of us treat Jesus that way. We don’t really let him into our hearts, into our minds, into our lives. And when we don’t let him in, he can’t do much for us.

Just yesterday God brought to my attention a little poem about Christmas cards that goes like this:

We have a list of folks we know
All written in an address book,
And every year when Christmas comes
We go and take a look.
That is when we realize
These names are all a part,
Not of the book they’re written in,
But of our very hearts.

Never think our Christmas cards
Are just a mere routine
Of names upon a Christmas list,
Forgotten in between.
When we send a Christmas card
That is addressed to you,
It is because you are on the list
Of folks we’re endeared to.

Each name stands for someone
Who has crossed our path sometime
And in that meeting they’ve become
The rhythm in each rhyme.
While it may sound fantastic
For us to make this claim
We really feel that we’re composed
Of each remembered name.

You may not be aware
Of any special link,
Just meeting you has changed our lives
Much more than you may think.
For once we’ve met somebody
The years cannot erase
The memory of a pleasant word
Or of a friendly face.

Every year when Christmas comes
We realize anew
The best gift life can offer
Is meeting folks like you.
So, may the spirit of Christmas
That forevermore endures
Leave its richest blessings
In the hearts of you and yours.ⁱⁱ

I cannot prove to you that God exists, or that God sent himself to us in Jesus. I can only invite you to welcome Jesus as your friend, your guide, your Savior, and your Lord. When you do, he will prove himself to be a person whose presence in your life changes your life forever. A Christmas card is really nothing more than a piece of paper that reminds you of a person who is important in your life. Jesus is the “Christmas card” who reminds you of a God who loves you, and he is also God himself, the person like no other, whose presence in your heart and in your life will fulfill the promise of which Zechariah spoke, “to guide your feet into the way of peace.”

Amen.

ⁱFrom Ace Collins, Stories Behind the Great Traditions of Christmas, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2003, p. 53-60.
ⁱⁱThanks to Kari Ravazzolo!

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