4. Why God Doesn't Do Gift Cards Series

Blessed Broken Given, Week 4: Why God Doesn’t Do Gift Cards

Good morning. Please open your Bibles to Luke 24

I once heard that a “coincidence” is when God does something but chooses to remain anonymous. Well, I’m not sure I can go along with that, because I think whenever God is at work He deserves the glory and He seeks His own glory. So I’m not going to call it a coincidence that we are finishing up our series called “Blessed, Broken, Given” on the same day that we begin the season of Advent, in which we celebrate God giving His one and only Son to the world.

Because this is the season of giving. Thursday we began the countdown of how many shopping days there are until Christmas.

My brother wrote a great blog post this past week as we were reflecting on our family tradition of “Thanksmas.” And he reminded me that when our family did our gift exchange, we made the decision to ban gift cards.

Now, I may step on some toes here, because I know lots of people love giving and receiving gift cards. The United States will spend nearly $171 billion on gift cards this year. I actually found out this week that Alabama is the most popular state for gift cards (29.3% of Alabamians said they would prefer getting a gift card for Christmas). They’re easy. They’re convenient. They don’t even have to be for any particular store. And If you don’t know the person you’re giving the gift card to very well, you can just do a Visa gift card, and the recipient can use it anywhere he or she wants. And that’s good because you don’t have to know what they’re allergic to, or what sports team they like, or anything about them. You can avoid those embarrassing “what size do you wear” type questions.

So if you want to remember your favorite server at Chappy’s? Gift card.

If you are doing something for your mailman (or mail woman, or femaleman, or whatever the politically correct term is)? Gift card.

If you’re doing something for your pastor? Starbucks gift card. 100%.

But here’s why my family banned gift cards. We banned gift cards because we knew it would force us to have at least one meaningful conversation with a random family member every year. See, Jacksons aren’t really stellar at communication, but we knew we’d have at least one phone call with whoever’s name we drew for Thanksmas (Hey, nephew, this is James… Jackson.) We also knew that if we made up our minds ahead of time that gift cards weren’t going to be an option, it would force us to pay attention to what the person on the receiving end of our gift really needed. It would be harder. We would have to fight crowds at an actual store. And (gasp!) rather than just send something through the mail, we might actually have to show up and be face to face with the person who would receive the gift.

The gift card ban made it harder, but it also made it more personal. Just like it was designed to.

Sometimes, a gift card communicates that you don’t know someone well enough to know what they need, and you’re too busy to find out, so you figure you’ll just let them decide for themselves.

And the truth is, sometimes when we are on the receiving end of a gift card, we jump immediately to how we can use this card to get what we want, and we kind of bypass the relationship we have with the person who gave it.

As we transition from Thanksgiving to Advent, I want to talk about why God doesn’t do gift cards. He doesn’t give us the option of just deciding for ourselves what we think we need, and just creating a Messiah that is going to fit our agenda. And he definitely didn’t just phone it in. When God gave His only Son for our salvation, that means that Jesus came face to face with humanity. He lived with us before he died for us.

Our Scripture for this morning is Luke 24, starting in verse 13. I invite you to turn there.

Here’s the scene: It’s resurrection Sunday. That morning, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus and some other women went to Jesus’ tomb and found it empty. Two angels appeared to the women and told them that Jesus had risen from the grave. They ran back, told Peter, who ran back to the tomb (Luke’s gospel doesn’t mention it, but we know from other gospel accounts that Peter and John went together), and they also found it empty.

So we don’t know exactly when on that day the events of verses 13-35 happened, but we know it’s late enough in the day for the report to have gotten beyond just the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples. Let’s read the word together: