Classic and contemporary excerpts.
Poor substitute
The Christmas tree has taken the place of the altar in too much of our modern Christmas observance.
—Earl Riney in Church Management
More than an economic high
Our whole society … is focused on the celebration of Christmas. With the excessive commercialism which begins in our country immediately after Halloween (once it started the day after Thanksgiving), with the secular gaiety and extravagant glitz, with the sickening efforts to sanctify profit-making, the “Reason for the season” (that’s the by now too-commonplace cliché among evangelicals) is ignored more often than not. The mind-boggling mystery of God-in-the-flesh tends to become a mere stimulus for our economy.
—Vernon Grounds in a 1991 Christmas letter
The pattern of Bethlehem
At Christmas we say much of the meaning of His coming to earth, the mission, the message, but we sometimes overlook the manner of His Advent. God set it up in a pattern we never would have dreamed. He was born in a stable to a lowly peasant couple in an insignificant town in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire. Think how we would have arranged it [today] in this publicity-mad day! That same pattern my Lord followed all His days; and the Church might take a hint today, when Hollywood sets the style.
—Vancer Havner in A Treasury of Vance Havner
Blessed Advent
As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; as God alone he would not. Incarnate, he could and did.
—Malcolm Muggeridge in Jesus
Love Came Down at Christmas
Love came down at Christmas,
love all lovely, love divine;
love was born at Christmas—
star and angels gave the sign.
Worship we the Godhead,
love incarnate, love divine;
worship we our Jesus—
what shall be our sacred sign?
Love shall be our token
love be yours and love be mine;
love to God and neighbor
love for prayer and gift and sign.
—Christina Rossetti, 1883
The Word made flesh
The Word of God, Jesus Christ, on account of his great love for mankind, became what we are in order to make us what he is himself.
—Saint Irenaeus in Adversus haereses, V
The visit of God
On that first Christmas morning, the world must have seemed a hard place to Mary. At the end of a weary journey there was “no room at the inn.”
The only shelter offered to her was the “lowly cattle shed.”
I find this a great mystery and a great wonder. Every day science discovers more and more of the complex wisdom of God. Anyone who uses his mind has a much bigger idea of God than our grandfathers, or even our fathers, ever had. Yet God has been here on this planet, in person.
What we are celebrating … is not the feast of jolly old Father Christmas or good King Wenceslaus, or a beautiful fairy-tale.
We are celebrating the visit of God.
How marvelous!
—J. B. Phillips in For This Day
Eternal linkage
Sever Christmas from Good Friday and the result would be to doom Christmas as nothing more than a time to be merry and gay based on Lore.
—Hulda C. Miller in The Crèche and the Cross
Unfathomable mystery
The mystery of the humanity of Christ, that He sunk Himself into our flesh, is beyond all human understanding.
—Marlin Luther in Table Talk
The enormity of it all
“It seems, then,” said Tirian, … “that the Stable seen from within and the Stable seen from without are two different places.”
“Yes,” said the Lord Digory. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”
“Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”
—C. S. Lewis in The Last Battle (The Chronicles of Narnia)
