As we approach the Christmas season, we often feel weighed down by losses, hurts and disappointments that seem to conflict with all the celebrations around us. Blue Christmas is meant to help us bring these things before our God, who understands. Christmas, after all, is about Him coming into the world to restore the things that are broken — including us.
This service will be both in-person and live streamed at 7 pm on December 1. Please join us in-person if you can; if you cannot, you can find the service on your favorite streaming service below. For those watching online, consider having a candle available to light at a time you will be prompted to do so later in the service.
When Christmas lights are shining and your life still feels tangled, what do you do with the grief, fear, or uncertainty you carried into the season? Matthew 1 places that same tension at the heart of Jesus’ birth: Mary and Joseph receive wonderful news from God just as their plans, reputation, and future seem to be coming apart.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Alleluia. Alleluia.
So it’s a rainy night tonight, and driving in, it looked beautiful. If you looked at the roads, the headlights shining in them, you could see the glistening of that light. There was a beauty to it. I also thought, what if it were a few degrees cooler? If it were a few degrees cooler, we would have been trying to figure out if everyone could arrive here safely because it wouldn’t have been rain; it would have been ice or snow.
Now, snow itself, if you’re not trying to be someplace, is also beautiful, isn’t it? I love a snowy winter’s day. I wish we had more snowy winter days — those days where the land is just completely blanketed in white, and you look out and it’s sparkling, and everything that’s just ordinary and dull has been turned to glistening, pure snow. The little soft, gentle mounds, even if you don’t build a snowman, it looks like things are forming out there. It’s beautiful.
But what if you need to be someplace? That’s not so beautiful. Remember years ago, trying to get to Christmas Eve service, snow coming down like crazy, thinking, if I weren’t on duty, if I didn’t have to be here, I’m not sure this is a good idea to be on the road. You’ve had that experience. I bet most of us have. We have enough snow here that we have times that we may need to be someplace and it’s snowing, but we don’t have so much snow that maybe we’ve mastered driving in snow like people in some places. If someone were listening tonight from Alaska, and I say that, you’d probably think, wimpy snow in St. Louis. There’s no reason anyone should ever have a problem getting anywhere there.
And yet, it seems challenging, and certainly if it turns to ice, it’s challenging. And then that ice starts to weigh down the tree branches, and those tree branches start to crack, and they hit power lines, and suddenly that beautiful, glistening, wonderful snow—the snow that makes everything look so wonderful—suddenly is taking out the power, and everything is incredibly dark and cold.
The beautiful, glistening roads tonight, I thought about those, and on the one hand, it did look beautiful. I took a picture at a stoplight, and I was stopped, and I took a picture tonight, and it looked beautiful, but it was all the headlights on the road, and it looked beautiful, and yet it wasn’t really beautiful because the reason there were so many headlights parked on the road is because there was a horrific accident just down the road from there. Traffic wasn’t moving. And so this thing that on the one hand looked beautiful, and in some sense genuinely was beautiful, was also quite terrible.
It’s funny how a little perspective changes things, isn’t it, that you can have something that just catches your eyes as sheer beauty on the one hand, and at the same time, that very same thing, those very roads that were glistening were the roads that made conditions a little less than ideal, and presumably someone slid into someone else, and it turned into a really bad accident.
That beautiful glistening snow and ice that makes the winter scene that we imagine on a Hallmark postcard or greeting card for Christmas is also that which takes away the power and leaves us in the cold.
So it is at Christmas. We encounter Christmas. We arrive at Christmas, and there’s so much that we do—not necessarily straight out of the Bible, nothing wrong with it—but things that we do: Christmas trees, beautiful twinkling, all these sorts of things. I love them. I can’t get enough of them. They look so beautiful, and yet we find ourselves in those places where there’s the darkness in life, where we walk in and there’s something that has deeply unsettled us. And just like that ice on the one hand looks beautiful, but as it weighs down that weak tree branch, it breaks. And it feels like even the beauty of those twinkling lights at Christmas are weighing us down.
The question is, what are we going to do with it? How do we make sense of that? And that’s why we have a blue Christmas service. It seems kind of odd in a sense to take the season that’s the most wonderful season of the year, as the song says, and to turn it into something where we’re going to talk about that which is mournful. And yet God didn’t come into the world—God in the flesh, that wondrous mystery that is at the center of everything we do as Christians, everything we confess, every reason why we are here—it didn’t happen because things were great. It didn’t happen because everything was exactly how we would hope it would be.
That beautiful moment when Jesus was born, that moment that we celebrate as the greatest miracle that God would come into the world to save us—and make no mistake, friends, I said when we started, the baby in the manger, that’s not a separate miracle from the cross. The baby is in the manger to be on the cross. In fact, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, God incarnate, the one who made everything, came into the world fully knowing exactly what he was going to do, the pain he was going to take on.
And so when we think about, even if we sort of gloss over the unfortunateness of the situation for a moment, and we try to make that manger seem beautiful, and we paint halos over everyone’s heads, it looks so good in that moment—exactly what Simeon says to Mary, her heart’s going to be pierced. In the manger, if you look in the back of the stable, the cross is right there. It’s coming.
And so we see both highlights and lowlights, and right in the middle of the Christmas story we see both, and that’s what we’re going to look at tonight. I think it’s so important that we see that, because as we approach Christmas ourselves, we bring highlights and lowlights. Maybe the highlights are, it’s Christmas, it’s beautiful, I love Christmas, I have wonderful memories of Christmas. Lowlights are, I have wonderful memories of people who aren’t here anymore. I’m not sure I’m going to pay for the things I bought for people for Christmas, because I’m not sure I’m going to have a job. I’m not sure how many more Christmases I have because I don’t know what’s going on with my health. I just can’t get into it, because it’s been a really, really hard year, and while all that stuff looks beautiful, life doesn’t feel beautiful. Highlights and the lowlights come together, and God meets us there.
Let’s go ahead and pray that our God would help us as we look at His Word. Let’s pray.
Father, we come before You as those who see the beautiful lights, who have so many reasons to celebrate, and most of all to celebrate because You love us and came into the world for us. And yet, we come with the things that burden our hearts. Each person in this room, I know, is carrying things that are hard. Each person on the online live stream, I know, it’s the same. We all carry things, Lord, but we come to the God who understands because You have taken on our pain. We pray that You would help us tonight as we look at this to understand that You have taken that on, and because of that, we have hope, even in those times where the branch breaks and the power goes out. And we pray this in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.
Well, let’s turn our Bibles to Matthew. We’re going to look at Matthew chapter 1, verse 18. Here’s what it says:
“Now, the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.”
That’s a straightforward enough verse for us, right? Because we’ve heard it so many times. We’ve heard it for all our lives for most of us, if not all of us. We’ve heard it over and over again. We hear it every Christmas. You put in a Christmas album and someone does a voiceover of it over the music, and it sounds beautiful and it sounds wonderful, and there’s so much there that is wonderful. We don’t want to miss that.
Let’s go into Mary’s life for a moment and imagine where she is as this happens. And it starts with what it says her current place in life is. She is betrothed to Joseph. We don’t use that word a whole lot anymore, and we kind of use it loosely when we do. But to understand betrothal, it was a more serious form of engagement. We’re going to find out in a moment just how much more serious, but she was betrothed to Joseph.
And everything we know about Joseph, we don’t know a lot about him, but here’s what we do know about Joseph. It seems like Joseph was a really, really good man. Now we use that relatively in the case of anybody in this world, right? Because all of us are not good before God, but by every measure that we could, it seems like Mary has found someone who is truly, truly a good man.
So you imagine them planning their life together, their life together, and what that looks like. And maybe they were trying to figure out if there was a house or a little place they could build; Joseph was a carpenter, maybe it was to build, or they could buy, that was near the rest of the family. What things were they thinking about? Maybe there was a family farm that Joseph had his wood shop at, and he was imagining building a little place right past that. We’re not given those details, but we know they were planning those sorts of details. That’s what you do, right? They were planning that.
This is a highlight, or it’s supposed to be.
What else is a highlight? Well, we’re told that Mary has been chosen. Mary has been chosen to give birth to the Messiah. Is that a highlight? Oh yes, that’s a highlight, right? I mean, she is chosen of every woman ever to exist on this earth to do something absolutely incredible, to actually give birth to and raise up the Son of God.
Listen to what we hear that Mary is going to, this good news that Mary is told in Luke chapter one, verse 32. It says, “He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
Can we say that’s a highlight? I think we can say that’s a highlight. Maybe in the moment as Mary’s processing this, there’s a little bit of, wow, this is amazing news, this is great news. You know, we’re just lowly in the grand scheme of society, but this is going to be so great when Joseph and I raise up this child. And then she starts to see the details here, and yeah, there’s a little bit more to it, isn’t there?
I was curious, so I was looking up the other day the history of the good news, bad news joke. We all know those, right? The joke, the doctor comes and says, I have good news and I have bad news, which would you like first? Well, I figure that probably went back centuries. It actually only goes back to the 1960s. But the phrase good news and bad news goes back even further. It goes back to at least 1860 when Walt Whitman used it in his famous anthology of poetry, Leaves of Grass. He has a stanza in there that says, “The door that admits good news and bad news. The door whence the son left, home confident and puffed up. The door he entered again from a long and scandalous absence, diseased, broken down, without innocence, without means.”
He imagines the son going off, maybe, I kind of can picture it, and given the context, I’m not so sure that this wasn’t what Whitman was picturing too, maybe going off as a decorated young soldier, coming back with all the failures, both physical and moral, of being off at war.
It pictures life, doesn’t it? It pictures life because so often the very things that bring joy also bring sadness. And Mary’s going to experience that here, and I think that’s why also the phrase good news and bad news resonates with us. Why, even though it’s only been around for a few decades, does it seem so familiar to us?
Does everyone know that formula? It’s because even though it’s always said in a very ironic way, even though it’s sort of the extreme that doesn’t typically happen in real life, it’s pretty close. It doesn’t feel weird to us that someone comes with both good news and bad news. And Mary gets that. Gabriel comes, “Mary, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is you’re going to give birth to the Messiah. The bad news is going to happen right now by the power of the Holy Spirit, and everyone’s going to think that you’re unfaithful to Joseph. And by all the laws of the land, everyone should think that you should die.”
Now, of course, Gabriel doesn’t say it that way, but Mary can put the pieces together. And so she hears this highlight, this first Christmas present, wow, this is wonderful. She also has to feel the weight come crushing down upon her of everything it means. God meets us in those lowlights, not just the highlights.
Verse 19 of Matthew chapter 1: “And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.”
But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
So sometimes people can get kind of hard on Joseph here. Well, how could Joseph just abandon Mary in this moment? But if we actually put ourselves in Joseph’s place, it’s not too hard to understand.
What does Joseph do, though? Joseph doesn’t say, “Mary, I’m so disappointed in you, and now I’m going to make sure the entire community knows how disappointed I am in you. And we’re going to do exactly what the letter of God’s law says. We’re going to stone you to death because you haven’t been faithful.” Notice here that this betrothal is so much more than a mere engagement, because engagement, you want to, you can break it off, no harm, no foul. Some people might be sad, some people might be happy, but it’s not going to actually change anything. It doesn’t have any legal status. Betrothal did.
Joseph has to decide, am I going to divorce Mary or not? They’re not yet married, but he still has to make that decision.
And so right here in the midst of this wonder of what God is doing, what do we find? We find divorce.
You put yourself in either Mary or Joseph’s place. This is not a happy place to be. Joseph clearly loves Mary. He wanted to marry Mary, and all of a sudden he’s thinking, well, what can I do to just minimize how bad this is? What can I do to make this sort of okay? Well, I’ll divorce her quietly so at least it doesn’t get any worse.
Where’s Mary at? Things were going fine. They were planning where they were going to live and what it was going to be like and maybe talking about what kids they’d have someday and all this sort of stuff. And then the next thing you know, Joseph’s coming to her and saying, “Mary, I know what you told me about this angel, but come on, Mary. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. Let’s just do this quietly.”
They’re in the middle of a lowlight, and everything looks a mess. Where are you going to go with that? Where are we going to go with the messes of our lives that just feel like everything is coming apart? Everything is tangled up.
I’ve been sharing a lot about my uncle lately. It’s hard not to be thinking about him. Here we are in the Christmas season, and he’s on hospice, and he’s getting weaker and weaker. And it’s just, if you’ve been in that place, I don’t think you can ever do it so many times that it gets easy. And I guess it would be really, really tragic if it did. If anything, I think it gets harder.
And you can’t help but start to reminisce about Christmases past. And my parents and I were talking the other day. My uncle always would have an after-Christmas Christmas party. He picked that tradition up from my grandma after she passed. And so once he got a condo in St. Charles, he had this nice little place, and he loved Christmas lights, and he would decorate it to the max.
If Jim were here and I started to describe it, he would probably be having a panic attack over the wiring situation because there were that many Christmas lights in this condo. I’m sure any electrician would, but it was… Yeah, yeah. Oh boy.
He would have the lights or be panicked about the lights?
He would have the lights, yeah. And I love Christmas lights. Well, my uncle loved them.
He was never a terribly methodical, organized person in a sense, though. He was in some ways. He arrived to work really early because he never wanted to be late. But as far as Christmas lights, all of his lights were tangled.
And you’d walk up to his door, and you’d see the lights, and you’d have a tangled web of lights coming down around a ball or something, like an ornament. And then you’d go inside, and there were tangled wires everywhere. In between years, you know that they were never getting untangled.
Now I encounter tangled lights like that, and it just makes me start to kind of twitch. And I think about when I’m decorating with lights that are tangled, if it takes me five hours, I am going to get these things untangled. I’m not going to be a nice person to be around while I’m untangling them. I am going to be grumpy as I’ll get out, because I hate untangling lights, but I’m going to be untangling every single light until it’s not tangled any longer. Perfectly straight. It has to be in order.
But my uncle didn’t do that. And you walk in, and the lights aren’t on, and there’s these tangled wires everywhere, and it looks like a mess, and you think, oh boy. And then he turned the lights down, and he turned his lights on for the Christmas party, and all of a sudden, it was absolutely magical.
And they were tangled, but they were very intentionally tangled. He had them arranged. He had trees just looking like snow lights all over them. He had lights under the trees. He had lights going on every imaginable place on the walls. And suddenly what looked like a tangled mess was actually very beautiful.
Now the tangle itself didn’t necessarily serve that, but the light overpowered the tangle. That’s a picture of what God does, I believe, at Christmas, because if you think about it, you get all those lights perfectly organized, so they’re really representing how our lives are. No, we’re all tangled.
What does God do as he comes into the world? He didn’t take away the tangles immediately. He will someday. He didn’t take away all the tangles. Jesus was born in a manger, all these things going wrong—Roman oppression, people hating Mary and Joseph, all this stuff that would continue to go on until the very time that this baby that we celebrate is a man being nailed to a cross.
Everything is tangled, but God turns on the lights, and we see good news.
What do we do when our lives feel like tangled wires? Well, we realize that we’re actually recognizing how our lives are. If you come into this season feeling like your life is tangled, that you don’t know what to do, that you don’t even know how to make sense of why it feels tangled, you just know it is. It just feels broken. It just feels confusing. I don’t know what to do.
God is there working in that. It doesn’t make everything okay in the moment. It doesn’t make all the tangles themselves good.
The beauty of what my uncle did with lights wasn’t the tangle itself; it was that in that tangle, he willed it until he finally got enough lights that it looked beautiful anyway.
Sometimes we try to overdo it and polish things at Christmas, and so we say, well, you know, let me look at the tangle in your life—it’s always someone else’s life, it’s not our own. It’s clear that we can’t do this when it’s our own, but we look at someone else’s life and say, well, let me tell you how God is using this for something beautiful. It’s so good that this happened to you.
I’ve had people try to make me feel better that way, and I can guarantee you that in the history of the world, no one has ever felt better because they were told that horrible things happened to them and God was going to somehow use them for good in that moment. It doesn’t work, but it doesn’t make it untrue that God is going to use those things.
Not that it’s good. It’s not good that sin came into the world. It’s not good that that baby was born in a manger, despised and rejected by men, put up on a cross, and even after he resurrected from the dead and overcame death, that his followers were persecuted and killed. That’s not good, but God turns on the lights in those moments.
People persecuted Christians, and what happened? There were more Christians. People said, this is crazy—worshiping this man who was put to death—and what did Jesus do? He brought more and more followers until the world is filled. We have believers all around the world worshiping the name of the one who died and came to life again.
And I think about those lights that my uncle had. It wasn’t good, necessarily, that they were tangled. I don’t think he necessarily wanted them tangled, but what was good is that he turned them on. God takes us in our tangled state, and he turns the light on.
And as we look at this Christmas season, we think about it. Tangles aren’t all going to go away. It’s okay if you arrive on Christmas Day feeling mangled and tangled and not really sure what to do. But know that God is turning on the lights in that moment, and he’s shining through you as you trust in him in that moment—not because it isn’t painful, not because it isn’t bad. There is the bad news. That’s why we have that joke punchline over and over and over again. But there’s very, very good news in the midst of it.
And the Christmas season, whether it’s an opportunity to see, it’s a little taste of what will be. Because someday what is hope now will be reality. Someday God will wipe away every tear. Someday we’ll see nothing but beauty.
But as we think about what God did at this wonderful moment, and we remember when Jesus came into the world, we can turn down the lights for a moment and see a glimmer of that. Because whatever tangles are pulling you down at this moment, come with you into Christmas. Don’t feel ashamed that you have them. That’s why God came into the world. It’s okay to say, my life is tangled. Say, God, let me see the beauty of the lights you’re turning on. Let me see what you’re doing. I’m a tangled-up, wired mess, but let me see the lights on me, see how you’re using me. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, and restore all things.
Let’s pray.
Lord, what do we do in these moments? There are so many times it feels hopeless—those times like we imagine Mary and Joseph going through in that moment that feel so hopeless. What do we do? But Lord, we know that you are the one who will restore all things. So in this moment, as we come before you with the tangled-up, knotted mess of our lives, Lord, would you take these tangles and turn on the lights? Would you help us to see what you are doing? Would you help us to feel confidence in what you’re doing? Would you help us as we feel too burdened down by all the piles of wires upon us that we would see so clearly what you are doing and your presence with us—that we would see that you’re actually the one shouldering the load? Would you help us to rest in you?
As we hear the joyful Christmas songs and our hearts don’t necessarily feel perfectly in accord with them, would you help us to be reminded, yes, we might not be here yet, but it’s a taste of what is to come. It is a taste of what you are doing. It is a taste of what you are doing for every single person who trusts in you. Would you help us to do that this night? Amen.