The Culture of Christmas Spending...

During these days that lead up to Christmas, we are spending our time together as a church in a sermon series entitled the Advent Conspiracy. During this series, we are looking at an account of the Christmas story that is recorded for us in our Bibles called the gospel of Luke. Last week, we looked at the story of the announcement of the birth of Jesus and discovered in the response of the army of angels and the response of the shepherds what the countdown to Christmas is all about. We discovered that Advent, the countdown to Christmas is a call to worship. We discovered that Christmas calls us to worship Christ fully. And during this series, we will challenge ourselves to worship Christ fully during the countdown to Christmas in three specific ways.

This week, I would like for us to interact with a question. And that question is this: Last year, how much money do you think we spent, as a nation, on Christmas? If you had to guess, what do you think that number would be? Over the thanksgiving weekend, in spite of the difficult economic times, Americans spent approximately 52.4 Billion dollars in retail sales, which was a new record. For the Christmas shopping season, Americans spent approximately 450 Billion dollars. To give a bit of perspective, what we as a nation spend over the Thanksgiving weekend is more than the entire Gross Domestic Product for the nations of Yugoslavia, India, Pakistan, Cuba, and the Sudan.

Here is another question to consider: What percentage of the Christmas sales were placed on credit cards? The answer was 7.4% which was more than double the 3.4% from the year before. In other words, 7.4% of people knowingly spend money that they did not have in order to buy Christmas presents, which resulted in them entering into debt.  

Now here is one final question to consider: What was the one gift you remember getting last year for Christmas? What was the second? Do you remember? What was the fourth? Do you remember? If you do not remember more than one gift, do you wonder why you do not remember? Could it be that the reason that we don’t remember the gifts we received last Christmas is because the gift that we received was something that we did not necessarily need or want?

So does it bother you that you do not remember what you received for Christmas last year? Does it bother you that those around you probably do not remember that gift that you spent your hard earned money to give? And more importantly, does Christmas call us to spend more and more each year on gifts that we may or may not remember in the years to come? What does Christmas call us to when it comes to our spending?

To find the answers to these questions, I would like for us to spend our time together picking up where we left off last week. Last week, we looked at the responses of the angels and shepherds to the arrival of Jesus. This week, we will look at the response of Joseph and Mary to the arrival of Jesus. So let’s do that together, beginning in Luke 2:21:

And when eight days had passed, before His circumcision, His name was then called Jesus, the name given by the angel before He was conceived in the womb.

Luke begins by explaining that eight days after Jesus birth, and before Jesus was circumcised, Mary and Joseph officially named their child Jesus. Now a natural question that arises here is “Why did they wait until eight days after Jesus was born to name Him?” Usually, in Jesus day, just as it is today, the naming of a child would take place immediately after the child was born. Here however, Joseph and Mary waited until the day that Jesus was circumcised. But why would they do that?

To understand why they would wait until just before Jesus was circumcised, we first need to understand what circumcision is and its significance to the Jewish people. Circumcision involves a surgical procedure that involves removing the foreskin from the male genitals with a surgical knife, or in this case, a knife made of stone. In a letter in the Old Testament of our Bibles called the book of Leviticus, we see God command that a circumcision was to be performed on the 8^th day after a male child was born.

The reason that circumcision was so significant was that circumcision was a covenant sign that identified the Jewish people as being God’s people. Circumcision was a religious act that was required to be performed under the Law so that you would be able to be identified as being right with God as part of the Jewish religious system. Here we see Luke reveal for us the reality that Mary and Joseph were responding to the birth of Jesus by following and fulfilling God’s commandments when it came to Jesus.

Instead of naming Jesus, as the first born son, after Joseph or another male family member, Mary and Joseph followed the angel Gabriel’s command to name the baby Jesus. And Mary and Joseph also followed God’s command in the Law to have Jesus circumcised. Mary and Joseph were responding in worship to God by being obedient to God. Mary and Joseph were making sure that Jesus was identified with God’s people so that He would be able to fulfill His role and be identified as the rescuer of God’s people.

But that is not the only way that Mary and Joseph were responding to God’s call to worship, as we see tomorrow…