It’s Better to Receive than to Give

(image by Chris E.W. Green)

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“Get dressed in something nice,” my mother said through my bedroom door, “We’re going to church.” I was a teenager, somewhere between my learner’s permit and my license to freedom, and somewhere, I’m sure, a needle scratched clear off a record. Save for a Holy Roman shotgun wedding, where even elementary-aged me could sense the bride and groom were about to make a terrible decision, I’d never gone to church before.

It was Christmas Eve, and, as a  teenager, I had a few expensive (and awesome!) gifts on my wish list. None of them was what I ended up receiving.

From the discreet remove of the balcony, I learned “Silent Night” had more than one verse and I discovered that the magi were conspicuously missing from the gospel lesson the woman in the guady holiday sweater read for us. I’d seen the bumperstickers, of course. I knew Jesus was the reason for the season, but that Christmas Eve it wasn’t at all clear to me what was the reason to keep on fussing in the here and now about somehow locked away two thousand years in the past.

Not until the pastor held up a loaf of bread, broke it, and gave thanks to God and then, pouring wine into a silver cup, he taught us a word that not even this A+ English student knew: incarnation.

Lifting the cup of wine and showing it to us like Vanna White revealing a hidden vowel, he explained what lay not so self-evident in the familiar story of Mary, Joseph, and the heavenly host. God takes flesh in Jesus Christ, I heard for the first time. Our flesh, the preacher proclaimed.

God became what we are, the preacher preached so that we can become like God.

Here’s the thing—

As an adolescent, I had suffered acne so severe the dermatologist prescribed me medication I later learned had been used initially to treat Hanson’s Disease; that is, leprosy. What I was, I believed, was unlovely and therefore unloveable.   

To hear that God would put on my blemished skin, that Love itself would take on my unloveliness, become what I was, take my body as God’s own body…

That first worship service on Christmas Eve was like a wardrobe into Narnia. I’d been given a gift I didn’t realize I needed and wanted until I had received it.

What was that gift?

Let me ask a better question.

And it’s an important question because, let’s be honest, most of us would feel far more guilty if we neglected our Christmas shopping than if we neglected to go to church on Christmas.

So here’s my question:

Why should we go to church on Christmas?(For that matter, why should we go to church at all?)What can you receive at church on Christmas that you can receive nowhere else?What can you get at church no one else can give you?The answer, of course, is Jesus Christ.

Only at church, only where the Word is preached and the sacraments are rightly celebrated, can you receive Jesus Christ himself.

And everything that belongs to him.

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I shouldn’t have said “of course” because, of course, preachers like me mess it up all the time. We make it seem like what Church has to offer the world is politics or behavior modification, purpose or principles for daily living when, in fact, the gift we have to offer the world is Jesus Christ himself and everything (his righteousness, his sonship, his faithfulness, his resurrection, his Father’s eternal love) that belongs to him.

At the heart of so much Christianity is a strange and self-negating sort of absence. We gather on the sabbath only to hear about what happens elsewhere. In both overt and unintended ways, many churches signal that revelation happens everywhere but here, at the font, at the altar, on a preacher’s imperfect lips and in your sin-hardened hearing.

God’s out there, on the move, and it’s our job to find him and join him, preachers like me exhort. God happened in Jesus Christ, we say— and note the past tense, whose teaching and example we can imitate in our own personal lives and for our social causes. Just think about how many sermons you’ve heard over the years that implied the real stuff of Christianity happens not on Sunday morning but Monday through Friday, on the frontlines of the “real world.”

But those sorts of reductions of Christianity misunderstand what kind of word— fundamentally— is the Gospel. The Gospel is not a timeless set of ideas we can apply to our politics or personal lives. The Gospel is not a school of philosophy or, even, a way of life. The Gospel is not a means to make us or our children more moral.

The Gospel is a promise.

The Gospel is a particular kind of promise, in fact.

The Gospel is the promise by which Christ gives himself to us.

The Gospel works like a wedding vow, Martin Luther said. The Gospel is a promise by which the Bridegroom gives himself and everything that belongs to him to his beloved. What makes Christ present in creatures of bread and wine is the same promise of the Gospel proclaimed from the pulpit— the same promise we sing in our Christmas carols.

The reason this is the season of comfort and joy is because the promise itself gives us Christ himself.

Of all the times of the year, Christmas is the season when Christians should be insisting that it’s better to receive than to give.

What all our other versions of Christianity obscure is how what’s present to us in the promise of the Gospel, even if we are nothing but unimpressive, ordinary Christians, is greater than all the possible experiences in the world. Nothing less than Christ himself, Luther wrote, is what all believers receive by faith alone. By faith in the promise we are united with Christ. Through the promise of the Gospel— whether the promise is proclaimed from a pulpit or sung by a choir or placed in your mouth on bread and wine—  Christ lives in you and you in him. Through that promise, Paul writes, the Maker of Heaven and Earth dwells in your heart. God is not far away in heaven nor is God off at work in the world busier with someboday other than you. God is in his Word and the Word that takes flesh in the virgin’s womb still takes up residence among us.

The Gospel is the promise by which Christ gives himself to us.

This is why the Bible teaches that salvation comes by hearing because Jesus Christ is salvation and he comes to us the same way he came to Israel, by the announcement of a promise.

What I received that first Christmas Eve, in my ears and on my lips, it wasn’t an idea.It was God himself.

That’s why the church is necessary.

We only have one gift to give, as the Church, but it’s a gift that can be infinitely distributed. And because only Christ is without beginning or end, he’s the only gift you can receive that will keep on giving.

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