Richard Davenport
December 25, 2023 – Christmas Day
John 1:1-14
If you aren’t familiar with the TV show, “The Office,” it’s a fictional show that’s made like a documentary. The premise is that there’s this group that wants to document life at a small regional office of a paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. You have the secretary, the salesmen, the finance guys, the warehouse workers, and the boss, Michael Scott. They’re all a pretty eclectic bunch, but they all feel like real people, with hopes and aspirations, relationships and all the rest. Each episode is another day or two in the life of the office, watching them all interact with each other.
Michael means well. He cares about the company. He cares about his employees. He wants to do a good job, but he lacks an understanding of social interaction. He’s just kind of clueless. Many of the jokes are really just Michael trying to do something he thinks is helpful in some way. We, the viewers know what he is doing is rude or insulting to the people he’s talking to, but he doesn’t. So, we laugh when his actions have the results we know are coming.
One episode involves the office Christmas party and everyone planning for their secret Santa gifts. We see how everyone plans out their gifts with care, trying to pick something their recipient would appreciate. Michael turns the secret Santa into a swap, with predictably disastrous results. His goal all along had been to make sure a new employee was suitably impressed by the present Michael wanted him to have. Afterward, as the fictional documentary team talks to him, Michael explains, “Presents are the best way to show someone how much you care. It's like this tangible thing that you can point to and say, "Hey, man, I love you this many dollars worth."
You cringe because you know it’s a terrible attitude, but it isn’t all that surprising. That’s typically how we treat presents, as an expression of our love. The more extravagant, the better it communicates our love for someone. If I don’t quite love someone that much, well, then a smaller present does the job.
You see the resulting commercials throughout the month of December. Kay Jewelers or one of the other big chains will remind you that, if you really love her, you’ll get her a diamond tennis bracelet for Christmas. Likewise, only a new Lexus with the big red bow on it will truly show her how much you love her. Only something of that magnitude can really capture how much she means to you.
It gets to be a huge undertaking very quickly. You talk to your neighbors, you talk to your friends, you talk to your family, your coworkers, whoever it is. You hear so-so’s wife got him a fill-in-the-blank, but all you got was a new jacket and a couple of new ties. I mean, come on, Sean got a new grill. Dave got two tickets to the Superbowl. Kevin got that new fishing boat! Sure, I really needed a new jacket. Yes, I asked for some new ties, but really now. Is that all I’m worth is a jacket and a couple of ties? I deserve better than that. I deserve a family that actually loves me and shows it. I deserve friends who will show how much they care about me too. What I get from someone is a clear measure of my worth to them, and it certainly looks like the people in my life don’t value me very much.
When you watch a movie or a TV show and you have the guy and the girl who are kind of hitting it off, you can kind of tell whether they’ll actually end up together. They may be solving some huge international crisis, embarking on some grand space adventure, or just dealing the struggles of daily life. But it’s one of those things that doesn’t happen until it happens. Until the moment, they’re just a guy and a girl sharing the same space, they may be interacting a lot, they may be enjoying each other’s company, but that’s all it is until the two let their guard down a little bit and you finally see the kiss or you hear one tell the other, “I love you,” those three little words that are so difficult to say.
Even when you kind of knew it was going to happen, you still get the warm fuzzies when it finally does. It was supposed to happen and it’s gratifying to see it when it does. It’s kind of odd, when you think about it, because you never really see this kind of thing happen in real life. Obviously, it does happen to people all the time, but it isn’t usually something that has witnesses. It’s a private matter, a personal interaction, and it’s one that doesn’t typically work well with an audience. If it did, then there’s the risk the whole thing would be an act, all fake. But, in that unique way stories work, getting to watch it happen doesn’t ruin the moment and you get to share in the joy of the characters.
If you step back to think about it though, the whole moment is kind of simplistic. I mean, it could have been some harrowing adventure that brought them to this moment, some great crisis, some shared experiences that made them look deeper into each other than they would have thought to do before, but still, that specific moment, the kiss, the words, the hands held, the bodies close, it’s all kind of basic.
Where’s the stuff? Where’s the car? Where’s the diamond bracelet? Where are the Superbowl tickets? Where’s the big display of love and affection? If he really means what he says, if she really thinks like that about him, why don’t they show it in a big way? I know, it isn’t really how things are supposed to work, but it kind of does. Yeah, it shouldn’t be like that, but I feel all let down when everyone else gets the big, extravagant demonstrations of love and all I get is little stuff.
Why is that so wrong? It feels wrong when you stop to think about it, even though we just keep doing it. Love becomes equated with stuff, the more stuff, the more love. Except stuff can’t love. I know some people get really, really attached to things like cars or jewelry or that sort of thing. You enjoy them. They bring you pleasure or comfort or whatever. But the relationship is entirely one-sided. However much you may love your car, your car doesn’t love you. Your bracelets and rings don’t really care if you wear them or not. Your electronic gizmos don’t have any feelings toward you one way or the other. They simply exist and they are used or not used based entirely on what we do with them.
Things aren’t built for love. People are. People are created to love one another. People are built for relationships. People are built to live together in joy, peace, and all of the other emotions we associate with love. People are built to support one another, care for one another. When Luther talks about human relationships in his explanation to the commandments, he says we should love and cherish our parents. We should love and honor our spouse.
As with so many other things, we tend to emphasize the gift over the giver, as if the gift was somehow more important than the one giving it. We look at the gift as an estimation of how much someone loves us. We take it for granted that someone loves us at all. Why shouldn’t they? We’re so loveable that everyone should love us with their whole heart and their whole wallet.
When we focus on the gifts, we lose sight of the person who gave them and why they gave them. An expression of love from one person to another, a gift, with no thought to anything being given in return. Love is always about people, for people are the only ones who can love. No thing can love. No thing can willingly sacrifice its time and energy to help a loved one. No thing can give a hug, just because. No thing can step up and offer to take some of your burdens to make your life a little easier. No thing will think spending time with you is the best part of the day.
So, when God sends a gift to those he loves most, the greatest gift he can give is himself. He comes as a person to share his love with you, to spend his life with you. This is why Christmas is the way it is. We celebrate a gift. It’s the greatest gift because we celebrate the one who loves us the most. We also celebrate the forgiveness and life he came to bring us, but these gifts are part of the whole package. They are all meant to bring us together with the one who loves us more than life itself.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” God gives us a precious gift this day. He knows this gift will be maligned, abused, spit on, laughed at, beaten, and finally destroyed. Yet he gives it anyway, because it is the sum total of his love for us, wrapped not in pretty paper, but in plain swaddling clothes.
The idea of Jesus as the Word made flesh is one that you could spend a lifetime considering. Throughout the Bible, God is speaking. God is always talking to his people. He is always carrying on conversations with them. John’s Gospel puts a new perspective on this. God’s Word isn’t just a soundwave that travels through the air to be heard by your ears. God’s Word is active and vibrant, creating and recreating, changing the world to match God’s Will. God’s Word is the power of God Himself. God looks at his wretched and lost people in our sad estate and he says, “I love you.” But it doesn’t come as words to be heard. It comes as a person. God speaks, and the message is Jesus.
This tiny babe in the manger is proof beyond all doubt that God loves you, because the baby is God, come to be with his people, the people he loves most, the people he loves more than anything else in all creation.