Christmas Day, 1998
The Rev. Jerry Kistler
“The Real Spirit of Christmas”
Merry Christmas!
Christmas is a wonderful, beautiful time of year - the time of year when millions of people everywhere - all
over the globe - are asking themselves and meditating upon on a very basic question: “How much is this all
going to cost?” The bottom line: that seems to have become the essence of the late great holy day we call the
Christ-Mass.
We all complain about how commercialized Christmas has gotten, but every year we’re right out there in the
thick of it all, buying, spending, pumping our dollars into the great Christmas machine. And every year we hear
the voice crying out from this commercial wilderness: "We ought to get back to the real spirit of Christmas; we
ought to get back to the real spiritual essence of this wonderful day." But, of course, what that spiritual essence
is varies almost in direct proportion to the number of people you talk to. And it is almost inevitable at this time
of year that you’ll switch on the news or open a magazine and see the results of some poll asking the question,
“What does Christmas mean to you?” And the poll-ees always give such wonderful spiritual answers:
Christmas means family, or Christmas means the brotherhood of humankind or even earth-kind. Christmas
means peace on earth. Or Christmas means we’re all God’s children.
I’ve always wanted a pollster to ask me that question, because my response would be: you should hardly care
less. Who cares what Christmas means to me or to you or to anyone else. The only important question is: What
does Christmas mean. Period. What is the real essence of this holy day?
You might be surprised if I told you that the real essence of Christmas is, in a sense, not very spiritual at all
(not in the sense that people talk about spirituality today). The late Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple
once said that Christianity is the least spiritual of all religions. What did he mean by that? I think what Temple
was saying is that our faith is not about trying to find some inner connecting principle that binds all mankind
together into some all-overarching life-force; our faith is not about trying free our souls from the confines of or
physical bodies through deprivation and mystic contemplation; our faith is not about waiting out life in this
world in anticipation of a completely immaterial, bodiless existence in the after-life. Christianity is the least
spiritual of all religions because the supreme fact of our faith, the most basic foundational truth on which we
stand, is that God came down from heaven and entered our world and was made a man.
Christianity is not spiritual (in the sense of non-physical). Christianity is Incarnational. C.S. Lewis said, “There
is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature.” God
created us physical in a physical world. He created the sky, and the clouds, and pine-trees, and eagles, and
basset hounds, and granite, and skin, and smiles, and laughter, and music, and color, and sunshine, and rain,
and sugar, and coffee, and wine, and all things like these that seem to be wonderfully accentuated during this
holiday season. And I love this holiday because we get to simply enjoy these things. We get to really enjoy life.
Life is incarnational, because that’s the way God made us. He made us embodied-souls. And he said it is very
good.
But because we are embodied-souls, when man fell into sin, it wasn’t just his spiritual life that was affected.
Our bodies changed because of sin. We suffer hunger and thirst; we get diseases; we grow old, and ultimately
we die. All because of sin. And not only were our bodies changed by sin; the whole world - the entire universe
- was corrupted because of man rebellion against his creator. The world is hostile to man as a result. We have
to toil and sweat to draw out of the ground our daily bread until the ground reclaims us.
And so when the fullness of time was come - the time to redeem us from our sin - God sent his Son into the
world not only to appear as a man, not to be a disembodied phantom, and to teach us great spiritual truths,
because what would that have accomplished? Not much except for a lot of spiritually enlightened people in hell.
But when the fullness of time was come, God sent his son to be born of a woman: to be one of us; to take into
himself our body, our created nature, our flesh to sanctify and redeem our created nature through his death
and resurrection. A lot of people think that a very crude and unspiritual idea. A lot of people did in Jesus own
day, and in the early church. As a matter of fact, the very first heresy with regard to the nature of Jesus Christ
the church had to deal with was the heresy called Docetism which taught that Jesus did not have a real human
body, but only appeared to have one. They didn’t have a problem believing that Jesus was God; but they
couldn’t stand the idea that God would enter our world and be conceived in a human womb and be born with
all the blood and after-birth. And even worse to them was the idea that God would take a body and then suffer
and die. This was absolutely scandalous to them. But the Christians, on the other hand, realized that unless
God became a man, unless he became everything that we are - body and soul - we could never be fully
redeemed.
And yet there’s more to the Incarnation of Christ than just the redemption of our bodies. When Christ took into
himself our created nature it was to redeem not only man, but the whole of creation. Just as through the sin of
Adam the whole of creation was corrupted, so through the sinlessness of the Son of God the whole of creation
shall be redeemed. St. Paul says that “the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him
who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into
the glorious liberty of the children of God.”
So when we ask the question: What does Christmas really mean, we’ve got to recognize that it means nothing
less than that God has invaded our world, to redeem us and the world itself. That’s what Christmas means -
the true spirit of Christmas. It is an incarnated spirit - the spirit of God the Son made man. Praise be to Christ. +