What God Has Given
Perfect cakes, delicious cookies, and good tasting homemade eggnog, require not just the right ingredients, put the correct proportion of each. Chocolate chip cookies are not just flour, sugar, eggs, oil, and so on, but two cups of this, a cup of that, a teaspoon of this.
If you’re missing an ingredient, you might be able to compensate with another. Yet some ingredients are indispensable. No amount of anything will compensate for the absence of flour in the bread or of meat in the meatloaf.
A perfect holiday season might also be seen as a collection of all the right ingredients. The right family gatherings, the right food, the right friends, and the right gifts received.
Yet, without the One essential ingredient, these others get more and more out of proportion. No amount of gifts or gatherings – or familiar carols – can compensate for the absence of sincere thanksgiving for the birth of Jesus.
But the presence of Jesus Christ in Christmas – the inclusion of the True Flour in the recipe – sets all the other parts of the holiday in their proper proportion and compensates when some of those ingredients are missing or broken in our life in some way.
The more Christ is present the fuller and simpler the holiday is. The more He is absent, the more we overcompensate and overcomplicate with sentimental or material things which can never deliver what we’re really looking for.
What happens in the Christmas season is perhaps a snapshot of our lives – overcompensating with the other ingredients of life because of the absence of Jesus.
What would be the outcome of a properly put together life? Joy and genuine happiness. Contentment. Fulfilled purpose and meaning. Wholeness and completeness.
And, goodness. Pureness. A clean conscience.
We are not accidents that happen to exist. We are creatures, created by God. We are morally accountable to Him. And we are only complete when we are complete in God.
All the ways we seek to compensate for God’s absence – the good things and the bad things that run our life or that we run after – fall short. They fall short more the more they increase.
Without God, we are each a recipe without the main ingredient. With Jesus we have God.
That is what Christmas is about. Christmas is the thanksgiving celebration for the day God gave Himself to us in a way we could receive Him – In His Son Jesus: God as a Child; God as Brother; God in human flesh. God for sinners.
In the little town of Bethlehem – a real place at a real time – Mary, who was with Child, gave birth in a manger where the animals stayed. The “manger” was a feeding trough. And Bethlehem, her hometown – the city of her ancestor, David – means “House of Bread.”
Born in the House of Bread and laid in a feeding trough, God gave Himself as the ingredient needed – as the “Savior, who is Christ the Lord” [Luke 2:11].
“The hopes and fears of all the years” – all that our frail life needs and lacks – is met for us in that Child. He lived the life for us that had to be lived – He gave His life on the cross for us as the atoning payment that had to be paid – so that God and sinners are reconciled.
In the birth of Jesus, God joined the human race and, as a man, did for man what we could not do for ourselves. He lived the perfect life and died that perfect death.
He did this for us, so that we no longer must do it on our own.
And He shares His perfect life and death with us – within us through our Baptism – so that we do have His satisfactory life, born and growing up within us.
Just as He was born in Bethlehem, He is now born in you who believe and are baptized.
He is the true Flour and Meat in the recipe of your life. He is pure and good and gives a clean conscience – by the forgiveness of your sins – and a renewal of your life.
So, believe in Him – “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” [John 6:36]
And, if you haven’t been, be baptized – “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.” [Mark 16:16].
What God has given on Christmas morning – His Son, born in Bethlehem – is the missing part, the puzzle piece, the main ingredient that makes your life whole and gives peace and reconciliation with God – in this life, and in the life to come. Amen.
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