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Charles Shultz’s A Charlie Brown Christmas might give the best vision of what Christmas is as well as how we view it in this country, even to this day.
It begins with Charlie Brown standing in for many of us. He’s depressed by the season. He’s horrified by the commercialism of everything. He’s not even sure what Christmas really means, what it’s actually all about.
Everything Charlie Brown does is to try and find some meaning, to try and feel better. Now Lucy Van Pelt, who runs a highly questionable psychologist booth, gives Charlie Brown some highly ethically questionable advice. She needs a director for the Christmas play she and their friends are putting on. She tells Charlie Brown he should fill that role, not truly thinking about his wants or needs.
Charlie Brown tries to do his best to fill this role, but he still struggles. He still finds the world around him focusing too much on commercialism. He finds them too focused on what seems beautiful instead of what actually is beautiful. In despair he cries out, desperate to know what Christmas is really all about.
Charlie Brown’s friend Linus, younger brother to Lucy, steps in the spotlight to provide the very Gospel we read tonight, the very Gospel you likely came here to hear. Linus, at the end of his recitation, proclaims to Charlie Brown, “that’s what Christmas is all about.”
Like Charlie Brown, you may have come here wondering what Christmas is all about. Maybe like him you need to know in a very real and deep way, within the bottom of your soul.
Maybe hearing this story helped. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe just hearing the story of the Nativity wasn’t quite enough. That’s fine. That’s what the sermon is for.
That is also why A Charlie Brown Christmas doesn’t end with Linus’ recitation. It ends with a Christmas tree. Lucy tells Charlie Brown to go out get a fancy aluminum tree for their Christmas play. Instead, Charlie Brown finds a small tree, probably the only real one left in the lot. It is tiny and its needles start falling off, but Charlie Brown feels like this tree needs him.
When he brings the tree back, everyone in the play yells and laughs at Charlie Brown. Yet he takes it home and tries to decorate it, only for the ornament he puts on it to send the tree’s single branch falling down.
The rest of the crew follows him though, and Linus suggests that all the tree really needs is a bit of love. Everyone takes the decorations from Snoopy’s prize winning dog house and spruces the tree up. In the end, this tiny tree that was falling apart becomes something very beautiful and special. It’s enough to bring Charlie Brown and all his friends together to sing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”.
If you want to understand our Gospel reading today, this is how to do it. The story of Jesus isn’t about a mighty thrown or power. It isn’t even about having the flashiest Christmas tree.
The story of Jesus is about God choosing to come down into this world as a tiny human child. God chose to walk among us in all the dirt and filth that doing so entails.
God wasn’t born into the palace. Instead, God was born into a family of poverty. They weren’t well-known or connected people either. When they arrive to Bethlehem, they couldn’t even find a place to take them in. They had to go into a cave instead.
If that weren’t enough, Mary gives birth to Jesus in the only place she can find privacy, the area with all the animals. When this baby is born, the only place she can lay Him in is a manger, a literal feeding trough for those animals.
God endured all this for one reason and one reason alone: to save us, to fix us, out of love really. God came into this world, endured such harsh circumstances, and eventually died on the Cross for our sins so that we could be transformed and wouldn’t have to die in the end either. After death, Jesus rose, a sign that we would rise with Him too.
We don’t have to be big and flashy. That is not what God uses. Instead, God takes something struggling and insignificant, like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, and transforms it to something new, glorious, and magnificent.
That transformation is what Christmas is all about. God didn’t come into this world to be mighty. God was born into something small and insignificant. God died, something that normally would be a sign to us of failure. Yet through that death, our Lord rose again and paved the path so that we could do so too. The only thing we can say in return for something as glorious, loving, and live-giving as that is “Thanks be to God!”