Christmas IS for Fussers (Part 2)

Yesterday I said, “Christmas ain’t for fussers.” But––as Reb Tevye would say––“on the other hand,” Christmas is for fussers. We are a discontented race. We envy, covet, lust, gripe, murmur, dispute, wrangle, tangle, and war. If we have plenty, we are still dissatisfied that we don’t have their stuff. If we don’t have much at all, we’re despondent that the “1% are keeping us down.” But, Christmas is the offer of salvation from all our twisted up malcontent. 

We wanted to be as God, and so we grabbed the fruit before the Lord’s appointed time. The history of lost humanity is one long tale of us hating God and hating our brother. We hate God because His holiness offends our grimy-grey morality. We hate our brother because he won’t fall down and worship us. We are a miserable wreck.

But Christmas comes. And it’s message is that Christ humbled himself (Phi. 2:7-8). The Lord if Glory came down into the garbage dump of the cosmos, laid hold of the dead corpse of humankind, and took it upon Himself, died the just death which was coming for us, all that He might resurrect you and me to share in His eternal glory which he had with the Father and the Spirit before all worlds.

It is this humility which is both our salvation and our example. He became one of us, that He might save us from our gripes and hatreds and sins. Then He show us the way to be truly human. Christmas is for the fussiest of fussers. The grinchiest of grinches. The scroogiest of scrooges.

This great mercy is why His name is the name which will be upon every tongue, and to which every knee will bow (Phi. 2:10-11). So we see in the Christ-child both the one who will pay the death-price for our sin, and the one who will show us the way out of the prison of our sin. The cost of our sin was the humiliating death of Christ. The way out of our sin is the humility of Christ. So all fussers come to the Christ child, and fuss no more. Instead, let your knees bend low, let your tongue sing loud:

Hail the heav’n born Prince of Peace, hail the Son of righteousness
Light and life to all He brings, risen with healing in His wings
Mild He lays His glory by, born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth

Charles Wesley