One of the great Christmas Eve traditions of my family as I was growing up in a little town in New Mexico was driving around town. Sometime between the worship service at church and the setting out of the plate of cookies and glass of eggnog for Santa Claus, we would pile into the car and just drive around town for a while. The reason we would drive around town was to look at all the decorated homes. We didn’t have a Del Mar racetrack all decked out in colored lights, and frankly, I’d still rather see how folks decorate their homes than see a prepackaged, commercial display. One of the really cool things about Christmas Eve in New Mexico is that so many people put out luminarias—the paper bags with the candles inside—and there is nothing more beautiful than thousands of luminarias on a crisp Christmas Eve. I also remember being impressed as a young boy with those rotating aluminum Christmas trees that some people displayed in their living room windows, complete with colored floodlights changing colors from blue to red to green to yellow. My family never had one of those, and something inside me I suppose still wants one, but not too badly.

Decorations are a huge part of the modern American Christmas. Not only do we decorate the outside of our homes, we also decorate the inside. Some of us even decorate our automobiles. Some of us spend weeks and weeks putting out the decorations and then even more weeks putting them away. Rumor has it there is a home in La Jolla with a Christmas tree on wheels that the owner simply rolls in and out of its own special closet each Christmas, thus eliminating the need for the yearly decorating spree. Christmas decorations are amazingly varied these days. You can buy tree ornaments of Disney characters, Star Trek spaceships, and just about any other physical object made. Here in our Nursery School some of the children have made the traditional paper chains, with loops of red and green construction paper strung together and hung on little trees.

Historians tell us that Christmas decorations probably go back into the first few centuries after Christ when the early Christians adapted the Roman tradition of using holly berries and holly leaves. It was the Scandinavians in the Dark Ages who used straw to fashion crowns, stars, angels, and even manger scenes. Most people know that Martin Luther is credited with being the first to put candles on the traditional tree, but did you know that in 1882 a man named Edward Johnson was the first to string electric lights on a tree? He was a vice-president in a start-up venture firm headed by a fellow named Thomas Edison, and he spent over $1000 on eighty electric bulbs, more than many people earned in a whole year in that era. And apparently the first Christmas decorations made for commercial sale were garlands of glass beads made by the German company Lauscha in the 1860’s.

The first person to popularize one of our most traditional decorations, and the one I firmly believe is the best of all, was a creative fellow named Francis. In 1223, outside his church in Italy, St. Francis of Assisi reconstructed the scene of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, and it was so popular with the townspeople that every year after that he built it bigger and bigger, and then the idea spread to other towns. People began staging little plays using these nativity scenes as the backdrop, and the Christmas pageant was born. Some people, such as the woman to whom I’m married, think that you cannot have too many nativity scenes decorating your house at Christmas. Who am I to argue? The crèche, as the French call it, or the nacimiento, as it is termed in Spanish, is the best Christmas decoration because it is not so much a decoration as it is, of course, a picture of the scenes described by Matthew and Luke. It’s a picture so familiar that all I need to say is the two words “nativity scene” and all of us can immediately conjure in our minds some rather detailed version of a Mary and a Joseph and a Baby Jesus, along with shepherds, Wise Men, assorted barnyard animals, and at least one angel hovering over it all. A few yards behind me, out on the lawn, is our own traditional Village Church nativity scene, placed there every year by our Boy Scout troop.

For a few moments I’d like for you to forget about all the plastic Santas and silver bells and Baby’s First Christmas ornaments that populate our homes this time of year. Instead, I’d like for you to concentrate your attention on the biblical texts and the pictures they evoke, of the scene of the first Christmas. There is some debate, of course, about exactly what should be pictured there. Was the manger in which Mary placed Jesus a wooden box in a stand-alone barn, or was it perhaps a hollowed-out stone contraption built into a cave or into the bottom floor of a home? Were there three Wise Men or do we just think that because they brought three gifts? Early tradition says there were actually twelve. How many shepherds appeared? Did they bring some of their sheep with them? And had the animals been moved to make room for the people, or did the Holy Family simply squeeze in among them? If you read carefully, you notice that when the Wise Men appear, the text says they came into the house where Jesus was, which tells us that it’s likely the Magi did not appear on the very night of Jesus’ birth but actually arrive quite a while later, when Joseph had moved his family to more suitable quarters.

All of this is so much interesting speculation, of course. But I’d like for you to look even closer. If the best Christmas decoration is a depiction of the actual scene of the first Christmas, then what meaning can it have for us other than to remind us of what we already know so well? I believe there is much to be learned from plastic Josephs and ceramic Marys and wooden shepherds and glass Wise Men and terra cotta Christs. We learn not from the fake figures, of course, but from the real people of the real Christmas. And so here’s my only point of this sermon today: More than decorating our homes to celebrate the season, we need to learn how to decorate our hearts and minds and souls with the truly beautiful things that the people of the first Christmas can teach us.

When I carefully contemplate the characters around the crèche I see a group of people who have listened to God. Angels came to Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds. A star spoke volumes to the Magi. To listen to God is not such an easy or automatic thing. Some of us try for years to hear God’s voice so that we can learn what God wants from us. But perhaps most of us don’t listen to the things God already has said and still is saying through the words of scripture and the tradition and teaching of the church. Or we haven’t cultivated the habits of prayer and silence. Or we have learned to dismiss God’s voice as something else, calling it luck or intuition or just wishful thinking. Some of us wonder if God speaks at all, but if you will accept the existence and activity of God in the world, then it only makes sense to me that God is communicating with us. I cannot imagine that God doesn’t know how to communicate with us, and I can readily imagine the problem is so much more on our side of things, that we don’t know how to listen, or that we don’t really want to hear. No matter, the characters in the scene still teach us how vital it is that you and I simply listen to God.

Another thing the good folks who found themselves in Bethlehem that night did was to accept what God had to say to them. The Magi could have found another explanation, perhaps, for the strange goings on in the celestial sphere. The shepherds could have dismissed their vision due to stress and overwork and too much time out in the elements. Joseph had every reason to reject the situation in which he found himself and no one could really blame him if he did. Mary was in the most precarious position of all. What if she had said, “no,” rather than, “let it be with me according to your word?” Could she have refused God’s initiative? No, despite the rather absurd and totally unexpected conditions they would encounter, when God spoke, they listened and then they accepted. Last week an early morning television show featured the story of a man who gave up a comfortable living as a radiology technician to return to medical school and become a doctor, all so he could open a clinic in the poorest part of his town, giving up pretty much every form of financial and material security in his life. He did it, he said, because he had a clear prompting from God and he knew in his heart that he couldn’t live his life without making a real difference in people’s lives. Accepting God’s plan is not usually the easy thing, but it’s always the best thing.

Jesus’ parents and the first visitors at his cradle-side not only accepted what God had in store for them, but they then went ahead and did what God said. In doing so, they risked a lot. The Magi went to no small expense in money and time and effort to follow a star. The shepherds risked being seen as befuddled baboons if their vision of angels in the sky didn’t pan out. Joseph and Mary risked and perhaps even suffered ridicule and ostracism from their family and neighbors for having a child out of wedlock. After the Wise Men’s arrival and still another visit from an angel, they had to escape to the very land from which their people had escaped centuries earlier, going into Egypt to get away from King Herod’s murderous maneuverings as he protected his power. Some people think that having God intimately involved in your life is a warm, cushy, comfortable thing, but it’s not always so! Ask John the Baptist, who found his head served up on a platter. Ask Peter, crucified upside down. Ask Jesus. Doing the God thing is often doing the hard thing but it is always the right thing and the best thing.

The little entourage gathered around Jesus all listened to God, they accepted what God had to say, and they acted on what God led them to do. There were some notable figures that were not there, and so you never see them depicted in a manger scene at Christmas. God had sent the King of all Kings to be King of the Jews, but the current Jewish King was not so happy about it. Can you imagine what might have changed in Jesus’ life had Herod taken a different political position regarding Jesus and gone with the Magi to worship the new Messiah? God had sent the High Priest of Heaven to minister to the Jews and to the Gentiles, but the priests of the temple in Jerusalem had no clue what was going on, save for Zechariah, John’s father. And so also absent from the scene were the most learned and most respected religious leaders of the day, absent from the most significant religious event in history. How ironic. One group of people was not there that you wouldn’t expect to be there—the Romans. One of the most powerful and glorious empires of all human history found itself just a mere backdrop to the introduction of a new emperor whose own empire was of an order of magnitude beyond what anyone dreamed. Perhaps we need to develop a new nativity scene, with Herod and Priests and Romans all huddled somewhere else in the house, a long way from Jesus and the others, to remind us that not everyone got in on the glory of God that was coming into the world. And that might remind us that you and I have a choice to make about which group we want to join.

Some three decades after God staged the first nativity scene, the central character in the drama was teaching his disciples. He was talking about two kinds of people. The one kind is those who, on the outside, appear to be quite holy and righteous, but on the inside, they do not have hearts that are truly turned to God. He said these people were like “whited sepulchers,” referring to the practice of that day to whitewash tombs to make them more presentable, even though, on the inside, all they contained were dead, decaying, useless bodies. The other kind of person is the kind whose outer appearance may not be so wonderful, but whose inner being and spirit is truly open to God. They may not follow all the religious rites and customs, they may not have all the degrees and all the correct affiliations, but they do the right things, because in their spirits they are of God.

Christmas decorations are beautiful things. They are one way we celebrate the birth of the Savior. But they are only surface things, fleeting things, ornamental things. What matters more is the heart, the soul, the inner person. The Christmas decoration that matters to God is a heart that is decorated with a willingness to listen to him, a soul that is decorated with the courage to accept what he says, and a will that is decorated with the ability to follow through and actually to do what he commands. Outer beauty is purely a function of inner beauty, so let’s be sure that all of our decorating this year is merely an outward sign of the joy, the peace, the righteousness, and the love that is in our hearts today because of the birth of Jesus into the world so long ago.

Amen.

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