by Barney Wells, DMin
Director, The Fred Craddock Center for Preaching Excellence
Well, here we are at Christmastide again. If you follow a liturgical calendar, we are already past the first Sunday in Advent. If you are from a less-liturgical tradition, the first Sunday in December is upon us, and only two more after that until Christmas. We all know what that means—besides the schedule-packing burst of cantatas, caroling parties, youth parties, special services, and all the family things that crowd into this month, you also have to try to say something new and original from the same small handful of texts you are expected to preach every year: Matthew and a dreaming dad and visiting wise men (but stay away from the slaughtered infants—that’s a downer) or Luke and his singing angels and awe-struck shepherds. Maybe you can slip in John’s one-verse summary of the nativity, but you probably did that last year, or the year before. You could grab a text or two from Isaiah, or one from Micah (it has always puzzled me that Ahaz was such a scoundrel, yet he gets every Christmas card God sends in the Old Testament). The simple math is that you need three or four Christmas sermons every year, and there are only about that same number of texts from which to preach. To make it worse, there are those people who only come to church around Christmas and Easter and so are only there when you have to preach the same texts—they are likely to think that’s all you ever say. What’s a preacher to do? It seems to me there are four ways to respond to this challenge.
The first is to ignore the calendar completely and continue on with your series from Amos or 2 Thessalonians. After all, no one says you have to preach Christmas sermons at Christmas. Those who follow the revised common lectionary don’t have a Christmas text until the fourth Sunday in Advent, after all. Yet it is a season when the attention of folks within and without the Church is at least leaning toward Christmas, and it seems a waste not to focus that attention on the true meaning of Christmas.
A second approach is to preach those same texts but get very creative and find some new way of preaching the same text with the same meaning in a new sermon form or with new illustrations. That’s a good solution if you have the time and creativity.
A third approach is to go looking for novel texts that can be tied to a Christmas message: a psalm or a snippet from a Pauline epistle, or maybe Revelation 12 or Genesis 11 (think about it). That can help give the congregation a broader and more nuanced understanding of the sweep of the biblical narrative.
Dr. Craddock might suggest a fourth approach. Just preach the simple message of the expected text, a lot like you did last year. In a world where everything is changing so rapidly, people find peace and hope, comfort and joy, in the familiar. It’s like when Linus rescues Charlie Brown’s Christmas simply by reciting Luke 2. Like the ornament that’s been on the tree for decades, or that special dish that was always on Grandma’s table and then Mom’s and now yours, there is sometimes something blessed about the familiar, the recognized, the same yesterday, today, and forever.