“What do they want to be when they grow up?” That is a fairly common question that parents get asked about their children. In that moment, that future is far away, of course, and there is a sense that the possibilities for what the child will grow up to be and to do are, if not endless, at least pretty vast.
Even a young child might start to show an aptitude for particular areas of endeavor and study. What interests the child? What quickens her pulse? What is the child drawn to and fascinated by? Recently I read the memoir of a now-famous poet, and it was fun to read that already in elementary school she discovered that she was in love with words and language. When in the fourth grade she tried her hand at her first poem, it came out pretty well. Something of what would become her vocation and mission in life was forming already then. It may take some of us a lot longer before such things begin to gel into patterns that suggest a calling, a vocation. But for most people, it happens eventually.
We don’t know if anyone asked Mary or Joseph what they thought the future would hold for their newborn Jesus. But Mary at least had a firmer idea about all that than the average parent. She knew this was actually God’s Son. She knew an angel had told her that he would be great, that he would sit on the throne of David and reign over a kingdom that would never end. As new mothers go, Mary had a huge head start on that old “What do you think he will be when he grows up?” inquiry!
But first, these parents needed to nurse the child, change diapers, give him nutritious food, and all that usual childrearing stuff. And despite all the high-flying predictions of who Jesus would ultimately be, his earthly father Joseph did the only thing he knew how to do: apprentice his boy to be a builder by trade. Jesus could eventually reign over a kingdom without end, if God so willed, but in the meantime he needed something to do that would help bring a little money into the household while he was at it. Being the Son of the Most High was nice, but it didn’t buy groceries!
We know virtually nothing about Jesus’ childhood, and the few apocryphal stories that exist are pretty clearly flights of whimsy. Only Luke gives us even a fleeting glimpse of Jesus’ early years in the story about the time Jesus got left behind in Jerusalem, sending his parents into a panic. They find him soon enough, thankfully, but when they discover him engaging in high-level theological conversations with a bunch of religious leaders, they do not appear to have concluded, “Ah, yes, this is part of what was predicted about him, so this makes perfect sense.” Had Jesus been such an ordinary child for those first twelve years that all the big predictions about their son had faded a bit in his parents’ minds? Did even Mary forget the mission her child would have to carry out by and by? Maybe. But then, she may not be alone. Do we think a lot about the larger mission of Christ at Christmas, or are we distracted by all the outer trappings and lyric carols of the season?
We have been thinking about the larger theme of mission in Reformed Worship this year, but if there are any seasons of the church year when mission seems to take a back seat to other things, they are Advent and Christmas. These seasons seem to be all about a miraculous birth, singing angels, shepherds and magi, silent nights, and glittering lights.
Of course, nothing about all that would mean anything or would be worth celebrating if the child at the center of it all was not destined to save the world and then commission his followers with the task of telling the world about this salvation. And Jesus’ followers were not only to tell the Good News; they were to embody that gospel by imitating the man this child of Bethlehem grew up to be. The entity that would eventually be known as the church was to care for the poor and the marginalized, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, advocate for justice, and take care of the sick and dying. The church has the mission to notice the overlooked people of the world and have compassion on them just as Jesus did again and again.
As preachers we can help keep this in front of people at Advent and Christmas. Our sermons can help people connect the dots between all the familiar elements of the Christmas story and its implications for the mission of the church. We can even make it clear that if anyone has little interest in all that mission-related stuff, then it is disingenuous to celebrate Christmas at all. We cannot sing, “Joy to the world! The Lord is come!” unless we are dedicated top to bottom to embodying the mission of that Lord whose advent into this world does indeed bring joy—not a fleeting joy, but an everlasting joy that works to transform this world from the broken, chaotic place it is into something that begins, bit by bit, to look more like that kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed over and over.
In such preaching, we pastors need not come across as wagging our fingers at people who may not be thinking about the mission of God’s people during the Christmas season. Instead, as we should always do when talking about the mission of the church, we need to frame that inside the joy of grace. We want to display so much enthusiasm for the connections between Advent/Christmas and our wider mission that our zeal becomes contagious, the kind of thing others will want to share in. The mission of the church is never something that we have to do, as though it were some unhappy duty. Instead, the mission of the child of Bethlehem involves all the wonderful acts of ministry that we get to do on account of our union with Christ. People should no more need to be ordered to join in the joyful work of Christ in the world than a child needs to be commanded to enjoy an ice cream cone. The pleasure and exhilaration of it all should be automatic.
Each Christmas season we sing familiar words from “O Little Town of Bethlehem”: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” That is right. All the fears and brokenness of a fallen creation gather around the One who alone offers the hope that a better day can and has come. The church has the blessed mission to tell people that good news and also to live it out. Much of that does indeed begin with the birth of the Messiah that we celebrate at Christmas.