The Best Gift of Christmas
Titus 3:4-8
Kelvin Parks tells the story of talking with his neighbor about whether he had completed his shopping. He said he had bought a diamond ring. Kelvin said his wife had her heart set on a new car…. A Cadillac Escalade. So he asked his neighbor, “Didn’t your wife want a new Cadillac?” His neighbor replied, “Reverend, where am I going to get a fake Cadillac?” So what was the best gift you received at Christmas?
James Harnish tells the story of a woman in Tampa who probably received the best Christmas present of anyone. It came the week before Christmas. In August she had been diagnosed with severe cardiomyopathy, a rare heart disorder which causes the muscels of the heart to become inflexible. In fact, it’s terminal. The only hope is a heart transplant. Over the past five months, she had become progressively weaker. More and more of her active life has been taken from heras she waited for the possibility of a new heart. Then one day, at 2 am on a cold morning, she was awakened and told that a new heart was on the way. By 4 am, she was in surgery and by 10 am the next morning, she was out of surgery and in the ICU. When James Harnish visited her a couple of days after, they talked about the gift of a new heart and she said, “You know, this was the second time that someone has died for me.” Today’s Scripture reminds us that the best gift of Christmas isn’t under a tree, it is the gift that God gave to us in a manger some 2000 years ago in Bethlehem. The best gift this season towers over all the others because it is the most value gift of all. It is a gift full of mercy, love, hope and peace, joy and forgiveness. The best gift is Jesus’ birth, the coming of the Messiah, the entry of God into the world. And it was a gift which continued to give as he healed the sick, fed the hungry, forgave the sins of those far from God and eventually died on the cross for us.
We learn three things from the gift of the Christ child. It is a gift of kindness and love. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only son.” There are no strings attached to God’s gift. God didn’t give to us so that we would obey His commands perfectly. God didn’t give this gift because he wants us to love him. God gave because He loved us. And in spite of willfulness, rebellion and sin, He still loves us. Paul writes in Romans 5:8, "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." A gift in response to goodness is not a gift but a reward. What God gives to us is not a reward. We don’t deserve it. The love of God motivated His giving Jesus Christ to us. If we want to experience joy, we need to first receive God’s gift of love.
Second, God gave of His best, His one and only son. Our Scripture today puts it this way, “he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.” Dana Chau tells the story about a missionary in Africa who had poor health and depended on goat milk for his source of vitamin. One day, the tribal leader came to visit the missionary. After a few minutes, it was obvious that the tribal leader was interested in the goat. The missionary decided to give the goat to the tribal leader as a gesture of kindness to build the trust needed to share the love of God. In return, the tribal leader gave the missionary his walking stick. Without the goat milk, the missionary became weaker and weaker over the next couple of days. Using the walking stick he got from the tribal leader, he walked into the village to purchase some goat milk. When he offered to buy the goal milk, his money was not accepted. Instead, he was told that he was entitled to anything in this village that he wanted. When the missionary asked why, the villagers explained that the walking stick he held was the scepter belonging to the tribal leader. Possessing that scepter entitled him to everything in the village. And here’s the promise for us in this gift: since God gave us His one and only Son, we can be confident that He will give us everything else that we will need in our lives.
Third, God gave according to need. Paul describes our condition before this greatest gift was ever received. Titus 3:3 says, “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.” God came from heaven to a manger, from a manger to a cross, from a cross resurrection so that we might have forgiveness today and the hope of eternal life for tomorrow.
Much of Christmas centers around gift giving today and it is rooted the best gift of Christmas ever given. The wise men started it all. John Maxwell says we give three kinds of gifts. First is the gift for a gift, gift. We get a gift from somebody and so we kind of figure out how much it was and so we go out and buy a gift of about the same kind of a price and it’s a gift for a gift, gift. And every one of us has given a gift for a gift, gift, gift. The person who gives this gift keeps score. You might hear them say, "Oh, yeah. I got them something nice and they didn’t get me anything nice." Often times, they give because they received a gift they didn't expect and so they quickly run to the store to buy a gift in the same price range. It’s the kind tit for a tat.
Second is a gift for a favor. This person gives you a gift and expects you to do something nice for them. This is the I.O.U.s gift. We’ve given this type of gift before. We’ve given gifts before and we didn’t really expect to get back but, boy, we just did expect to have some kind of a little favor down the road sometime somewhere.
Third is what he calls a grace gift. It’s the gift that is unrepayable. The name of this gift obviously comes from God’s gift through his son, Jesus Christ, who loves us so much he gives us eternal life. Jack Wellman writes, I love the acrostic for grace: God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense. That is spot on. God’s grace could be defined as this: God gives us what we don’t deserve. Mercy could be defined as this: God doesn’t give us what we do deserve. We are saved by grace and not by works (Eph 2:8-9) and that’s why the gospel is such good news because if we had to depend upon works, none of us could make it and none of us could ever be sure if we’d done enough good works to be saved….There is never anything that we could ever do to earn it, otherwise it wouldn’t be grace! God’s grace was the most expensive thing that has ever been paid for and it was paid for by Jesus’ own life. It was free for us but it was of the utmost expense to God. What we could have never afforded to buy came to us completely free because He paid a debt He did not owe for a debt we could not pay. Thus, grace gifts are based on the grace we have received in Jesus Christ. We don’t deserve it, we don’t work for it, we can’t earn it and we could never, ever, repay it. It is simply a gift of grace.
Grace gifts are impossible to measure the cost. They’re usually non-material. It is a gift of words, a gift action, a gift of time or a gift of service. One morning in December 2009, Bill McDonald read in the paper that a local man, Joe Day, was sick with small-cell lung cancer. That meant Day couldn’t assemble the magnificently lit, handcrafted Christmas displays that had made his house in Versailles, Indiana, an annual holiday pilgrimage site for as many as 95,000 people. Day had made his own quick decision 33 Christmases ago when he came home one afternoon from his job as an electrician and found his five-year-old grandson, Nicholas, waiting. “What do you want to do today?” Day asked. “Let’s build a reindeer, Papa,” Nicholas said. They fashioned one using wood from a fallen tree, then set it out on the lawn and lit up its cherry-red nose for the holidays. Each year, Day added to his handi-work, placing reindeer on a track above his roof and winding lights as if they were electric vines around his windows and doors. Eventually thousands of lights, figures, mannequins, and models filled his yard and spilled into his sister’s property next door. But not this year until Bill McDonald thought, “It wouldn’t be Christmas without Joe’s lights. Somebody has got to help this guy.” So McDonald called Joe Day and said, “You don’t know me but I want to help you get your lights up.” Through word of mouth, McDonald and his wife, Toni, enlisted the Knights of Columbus, the Masons, the Lions, local firefighters, friends, and strangers to set up Day’s displays. For two days, more than 100 volunteers climbed in and around Day’s house and yard, following his hand-drawn diagrams that showed where everything should go. On the evening of December 12, with crowds of volunteers cheering him on, Day flipped the switch and lit up the spectacle. “This is what the Lord wanted us to do,” says McDonald, “to pull together, and be together, and help one another.”
But the very best gift you can give this Christmas is to Jesus. Ann Voskamp writes, “It’s almost a dozen years now, nothing under the Christmas tree here. Strange, the way children teach adults. It started at bedtime one year, I do remember that. Smoothing back hair, kissing foreheads, pulling up the blankets over my kids. Tucking them in. Prayers said all in a rush because I had gifts to wrap.. And then, when I’m at the door, one hand on the doorframe, resting in the light of the hallway, I turn to close the door a bit on the dark. And the oldest boy, he stops me with just one question: “What does Jesus get for His birthday?” The words hung… strung me up. I say the words into the black. Um… A cake? Our love? I can hear him turn again in the bed, roll over on the pillow. Restless…“But Mom…. if we get wrapped presents for our birthdays. If people give up other things to give something to us for our birthday — then why don’t we do that for Jesus’ birthday?” I stand at the door looking into all that light cast down the hallway… and I grope for the answer that could change the world… And the boy says: Why don’t we give up things so we can give to Jesus for His birthday?”
Is it always this way, that a little child will lead them? He was five that year, I think…I just know that now he’s seventeen and we all stepped out into some light that year and we’ve done all the Christmases since this way — giving away. It’s not at all wrong to do it differently, but just for us… all the Christmas gifts — are gifts for the Christ Child. I shamefully confess I thought it would somehow make me sad. I am a very slow learner. Only love under the tree can unwrap abundant joy. And the Birthday Child tells us what He wants: Give to the least of these and you give to Me. So this is how we do it: If any extended family doesn’t feel it’s Christmas without gifts, we honor and exhange gifts. And we make lots of love packages of baking for the neighbours and the excitement is about reaching out with His love. And we draw names in our own family and give only one handmade gift the week after Christmas, to each other on New Year’s Day, a way to celebrate the blessing of a New Year.
Maybe that’s the choice our Christmas needs to make: feed our own wishes or feed the real hunger of Christ? Nothing can be claimed, taken, received, had; everything we have is a gift to us from heaven. “All that we have has no other source but the hand of God (Jn 3:27). And that gift is always meant to be given.” When we pass our gifts on — the gifts from Him remaining a gift and being given again — we are the ones given even more of the source of all gifts — more of God Himself. When we give to Christ in the hungry, He satisfies our own hunger pangs.
A decade of this, our little family turning the Christmas tree upside down and letting gifts all fall into the hands of the poor. Sure, some thought it too strange, all this with no bows under the tree and really, I understood. But we couldn’t stop seeing just this, Him hanging on a tree. It’s just the way He’s just spoken to us, that’s all, and there are a thousand ways to do Christmas well. And then the unexpected happened — my Dad stopped by and stood in our kitchen with his hand on the counter, his farm coveralls still on, and he said it quietly, “I think this year — we shouldn’t do gifts as a family.” He looked up at me. My eyebrows arched. He did understand? “I was thinking that this year — maybe we should just all go together — and see if we can help drill a well in Africa.” And that one boy who was once five but is now pretty much grown up, who asked a question on a night long ago that answered so much — he turns to me and he smiles. His smile lighting the room and all the world. Amen
