I love this morning. It’s the first time since I’ve been at Bethany that Christmas Day has fallen on a Sunday, and it feels very, very right to me that we would gather together for worship on this morning.

Let me also just encourage you again to enjoy Christmas as a season. Other parts of the Christian church are far better than we at recognizing that the Incarnation of Christ, God-With-Us…is too important to spend just one day on. In worship, we will continue to enjoy the candles, greens, carols and music to reflect on Christ’s coming.

Jesus once said “that it is more blessed to give than to receive.” But I suspect that Jesus also knew that for us, it is far easier to give than to receive.

Many of you have already opened gifts within your family and circle of close friends…or perhaps like us, you will when you get home from church this morning. And you will discover, I think, how complicated this whole process of giving and receiving really is.

I was first introduced to the awkward topic of gifts when I started a dating relationship way back in high school with my wife Anne. I found out very quickly that Anne was extremely creative, and could do all sorts of things from draw to paint to sew.

I distinctly remember the awe that I felt…on the first birthday I had when we were a dating couple. I unwrapped my birthday present and it was a blue-plaid-flannel-long-sleeved shirt. My interior reaction was “Wow, a shirt.” I saw Anne just sort of looking at me. So I looked again, and this time said out loud, “Wow, a shirt!” I saw Anne still looking at me, a little smile on her face. There was something I had not understood. I looked one more time. This time I noticed there were no tags in the shirt. No tags. What does this mean? It’s inside out? She bought it at Goodwill?

You see, it was beyond my comprehension that someone could make a blue-plaid-flannel-long-sleeved shirt. I didn’t think people made them. I thought you loaded in material into some big machine, and hit a button and a shirt came out the other side.

That was only my first experience in a long line of experiences exchanging gifts with Anne. She would paint me a picture. I would buy her earrings. She would draw me something. I would give her a new mirror. The bottom line was: I could never compete, I could never match up to it. I felt guilty. I didn’t deserve it. How could I pay her back?

Christmas is the Season of Giving, right? What do we experience? Even the Supreme Giver himself, the guy with the red suit and white beard only gives conditionally. You have to deserve it, to earn it. He, after all, holds The List. Naughty? Or Nice? If, and only if you were nice during the year…do you get the presents.

Even a favorite of mine like Charles Dickens and his wonderful character Ebenezer Scrooge cast a shadow on this whole gift thing. A group of us just read A Christmas Carol, which I pretty much have to both read and watch every single year. I love that story. But it teaches us what? William Willimon says that by reading A Christmas Carol we learn that we too can become generous, giving people. It tells us that Christmas is about giving to others. Which is great, of course, it’s wonderful. But there’s a catch.

What the gospel writers tell us first is not how to be better givers, but to be receivers.

The Christmas story according to Luke, the Christmas story according to Matthew is about God’s gift to us. Period. The first Christmas, no matter how much we want to tie our tradition of giving gifts to the story of the wisemen bringing gifts to Jesus, the first Christmas was a time that the Bible just so clearly says was not about human ability or human generosity or human competence or human anything else. It was about God giving a gift to us. And if we miss that…we miss everything.

It is far harder to receive than to give. Why? Oh, there’s lots of reasons.

One is that we can be very arrogant people. On some level a giver is in a position of power. We want to be independent, competent, self-sufficient people. To be on the receiving end turns our world upside down

It also feels so strange to receive because it goes against some bad theology most of us carry around inside of us. It says “we get what we earn.” Goodness sake, our whole life in America is built around the concept. “Hard work, you get what you deserve, you make your own breaks, you pick yourself up by the bootstraps, you find the strength deep inside yourself. “

And then along comes the Apostle Paul who fairly jumps up and down on this ‘grace” word in the Ephesians passage that shouts out to us: “You don’t deserve it!” You can’t bring it about. The love, the forgiveness, the mercy of God is freely given. Grace.

Paul says “By grace you have been saved.” And then in case we missed it:

“For by grace you have been saved through faith.”

“It is not of your own doing.”

"But it is the GIFT of God.”

“Not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

We are saved because God gives salvation to us.

What is our part?

We are receivers.

Michael Goldberg is a Jewish rabbi who wrote a book called Jews and Christians, and in it he says that as a Jew he is impressed in reading the New Testament stories of the nativity by how utterly passive the actors are. They are not the warriors, the kings, the liberators with power. They are shepherds, teenage moms, carpenters who do little more than hold their arms open to receive the gift of God in a baby.

We are a people in process, I think. We have to learn, and re-learn, and re-learn again how to receive before we know what giving is about. A blue-plaid-flannel-long-sleeved shirt. The love of a friend. The grace of God.

It’s so appropriate that on this day of all days, we would celebrate Ezra’s and Annalise’s baptisms. That we would be witnesses, testifiers to God’s free gift to them. And it’s so appropriate that on this day of all days we would gather around this table.

Knowing that the God who came to this earth in Jesus Christ did so not because we deserved his company but because of our great need. At this table, we are receivers of God’s gift of forgiveness and grace. We come empty-handed. And having received, we become different people. On the night when Jesus was betrayed…