Christmas Everywhere                                                         12/25/49

 

Scripture:  Luke 2: 1-20

 

I promised the teachers of the church school that today’s Christmas sermon would be partly for the boys and girls who are in church.  I suppose nearly everyone in this room has had a hand in trimming a Christmas tree.  Sometime during this last week, perhaps as late as yesterday or last evening, you have helped set up the Christmas tree and put on its decorations, or have admired the work of somebody else who decorated the tree.  Dad or brother or someone else, puts on the standard to hold it up straight.  Someone brings up from the basement or down from the attic the boxes you’ve not seen since a year ago.  You dust off the boxes, open them, take out the strings of colored lights and tinsel and icicles and cotton snow, the colored balls and other ornaments.  Everyone is joyful, and merry, as you get the tree lighted and decorated.

 

Finally everything is on the tree that is going to be there.  Perhaps you have put a white angel or a star at the very top tip of the tree.  And it looks like the loveliest tree in the world.  It is the loveliest, for it is yours.  There is not another tree just like it anywhere.

 

Now all is ready for the gifts.  You begin to put around the tree the packages you have fixed -- nobody but you knows what is in them, because you want everybody to be surprised with the gifts you have fixed for each.

 

I’m going to call your attention to two or three packages which somebody puts near the Christmas tree -- maybe you helped fix them up!  Here is a beautiful package marked “Others.”  It has been hung high on the tree, just under the star or the angel, for that it one of finest meanings of Christmas joy - thinking of others.  You have a wonderful time hanging up that package.  There is no room on the tree for selfishness.

 

One day, during the war, a sailor walked into a place where many people were eating (so the story goes).  He took out a little cup cake from a paper sack he was carrying, put a tiny candle on it, lighted the candle and then started to sing:

            Happy birthday to me, Happy birthday to me;

            Happy birthday dear sailor, Happy birthday to me.

The people who heard him laughed, and many of them offered to buy him treats, until he had more to eat and drink than any one sailor could hold.  It was funny, for nobody knew whether the sailor really had a birthday or was just pretending.  I think it sounds as though he almost asked for the treats.  It was almost like someone asking for Christmas presents and saying, “Merry Christmas to me.”  I think the people who gave him things probably had more fun than he had.  The best meaning of Christmas is in the giving.  For Christ was given to the people of the world on Christmas - his birthday.  He is a gift to everyone, and when we receive such a wonderful gift we can not be selfish, but will be glad to give to others.

 

Last week we were all saddened by the tragic news that a family had lost home and three precious members of their family in a sudden fire.  Nobody is happy over that.  But I hope you have noticed how earnestly people have tried to bring back just a little of the happiness those people had before that tragedy, or to add a new happiness they had not experienced before.  Boys and girls have helped, by giving cans of food that will help out on the family’s meals for a while.  Thousands of people have sent money or put it in the cans or boxes or barrels about the town so that the family can get a new start.  There is talk of building them a new house for their home - and people really mean it, for they not only give money, but folks who know how have offered to help with the work of building the house.  I’m glad that so many people, all over this town, have helped to hang up a package marked “others” on the Christmas tree this year.  I think it is as lovely a gift in the sight of Jesus as were the precious things brought to him by kings and wise men from the east so soon after he was born.

 

Look at another package for a minute.  It is marked “Love.”  It is all wrapped up in “understanding” and tied with “appreciation.”  And it is hung high in the tree.  It is the kind of package you wrap up for Mother or Dad, for brother or sister, for grandmother or grandfather or someone else in your family.  There are lots of other people in this world who need that kind of gift too - even some of those people whom one sometimes calls “enemies.”  Perhaps enemies especially need the gift of love - it may even be that with such a gift, they couldn’t be enemies any longer, but instead, friends.

 

One more package has in interesting tag on it.  It is marked “Peace” and it is tied up with “good will.”  It has a very prominent place on the tree.  Just to look at it reminds us of what they say the angels sang when Jesus came to earth: “Peace on earth among men of good will.”  It is very important that we give such a package as this is, and that we receive it gladly when others have wrapped it up for us.  How can peace come to this war-ridden and angry world unless each one of us welcomes it in our own hearts?

 

Now that the Christmas tree is complete with these three packages, along with all the others, I’m sure there will be joy in your hearts.  You will be wishing a “Merry Christmas” to all the world.  And you will be a kind of happy echo of the song of the angels: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men.”

 

This last week I re-read that lovely story called “A Christmas Carol” written by Charles Dickens.  There is something like singing and sleigh bells and organ music in that story that makes it just fit the best that one feels at Christmas time.  A small boy, whom I know very well, played the part of Tiny Tim in this story, as it was acted out in his school a week or so ago.  It helped to bring the spirit of Christmas to his school and to his home.  The whole story is a reminder of the spirit of Christmas everywhere.  It is the spirit that brought bursting joy to the poverty-ridden house of the Cratchits, that even thawed out the tough heart of old Scrooge, that made people laugh and sing and do generous things naturally.

 

It is the spirit that even helps to brighten the homes that have had sorrow or unhappiness during the year.  How well I remember the gatherings of the whole Kingdon family at the home of my Grandparents as long as they lived!  Thanksgiving day, in my childhood household, was spent at the home of my mother’s parents.  But Christmas day belonged to the gathering of my father’s side of the family.  Grandfather would take a couple of the littlest children by the hand and sneak them into the other room for a peek at the laden Christmas tree.  When Grandmother and the aunts discovered it they would shriek and shoo out the old man and the little rascals, for no one of the children was supposed to see that tree until after dinner was eaten, the dishes had been washed, the ladies had gotten off their aprons and the kids had just about burst with turkey and excitement.

 

At the dinner table everyone would become quiet as the people were seated, and Grandfather would give thanks to God for His goodness to us all.  I remember the first Christmas after Grandfather had died.  It was not quite the same without him present.  But there were the rest of the folk, the presents, the tree, the shouts of “Merry Christmas” as each cousin came through the door.  When it came time for dinner, Grandmother asked my father, who was her eldest son, to sit at the head of the table where Grandfather had always sat.  As the family was seated, Grandmother looked at Father through misty eyes and said, “Henry, say grace.”  Father lifted the hearts of the family to God in thanks on that Christmas day.  Somehow it seemed better after that, for we all had so much for which to be joyful including our happy memories of Grandfather.

 

I hope that each individual present in this room today, each family here represented, has made today, not alone a day of merry festivity, but a day of joyful remembrance of the birth of Christ.  Some households light candles at Christmastide not just for the beauty of the light, but in symbolic recognition of the coming of the Light of the World.  Some arrange a crèche as a reminder of the blessed nativity.  Some gather around the piano to sing their remembrance.  Some sit down as a family while one reads the Christmas story from the Holy Bible.  Some let the prayer of thanks at the Christmas table be an utterance of Christmas praise to the Lord.  On this particular Christmas day in 1949, each of you gathered here has come in glad remembrance of Christ’s birth to His house of worship.

 

So let it be everywhere, in wider and wider rings of loving influence all around the world, until peace truly comes to a world where all men dwell in good will.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, December 25, 1949.