The Difficulty of Preaching About Christmas

Recently I sat with a group of preachers who meet to discuss preaching. We spoke of our efforts during Advent and noted, as preachers often do, that it is hard to preach about Christmas.

How do you say something new about such an old, much-used theme? How do you say something that will be heard in this noisiest of all seasons? How do you say something profound about the events Christians find most deeply meaningful in all of human history. To what do you compare that which is incomparable? (The same difficulty attends our efforts to preach about Easter.)

Part of the difficulty lies in the unique character of the Christ event. It is so exceptional, so profound, that you cannot illustrate it by some other similar event. You can't explain in in terms of other things we know. You simply have to keep coming back to the story of the baby born at Bethlehem.

Part of the difficulty comes from being adults. Christmas, at least our idealized expectation of Christmas, belongs to children. The joy we seek each December is tied to a more simple, carefree time when we were very young. With the passing of the years we have lost much of the fantasy and imagination that thrilled us in those days. It is harder for us to get excited about Christmas, unless our understanding of Christmas has deepened and matured as as the more childish elements dropped away.

Of course, the child's appreciation of Christmas is not all childish. There is profound truth in the childlike sense of wonder and trust. Struggling preachers would do well to reach back and recover the spirit of the child even as they continue to mature as adults.

The answer to the problem lies in going deeper. Theologically, we have a lot to learn about what it means for the Word to become flesh. Personally, we have to face the question, How real is Christ in our own experience? Existentially, we need to understand better the human condition that Jesus came to redeem and the possibilities of a life lived by his grace. Homiletically, we need to admit that our creativity needs renewing and we need to pay more attention to story, drama, poetry, and music as we approach Christmas.

Unless we do these things as preachers and as listeners to sermons, we will grow stale and flat. Doing the same thing over and over again without new resources will become boring. The preachers in my group have all been at it for twenty years or more--in my case, much more. This is also true of many of our hearers. Life has taken its toll on all of us. We grow tired. We run out of ideas and energy. The good news is that Christmas is about salvation from sin, about new beginnings, about God's faithfulness, about the miraculous power of the Spirit, about life. If that is not exciting to us, we have missed the point.