What Kind of Journey Will You Take for Christmas?

I. A Sentimental Journey – Totally Secular in Nature

You can have a "White Christmas", with snow, fire in the fireplace, nostalgia, sleigh bells in the snow and a commercial Santa

Traditional symbols of tree, gifts, ornaments, lights, bell ringers, mistletoe with mostly no meaning

What about "I’ll be home for Christmas" – if only in my dreams; home and family, maybe good desire of soldiers

Many expectations with gifts for everyone, meals for the disadvantaged; happiness and joy all around, but is it the joy of Gal. 5:22? Probably not!

Wishes for peace on earth, good will to men, happy holidays – very sentimental, right out of a Christmas story or poem, but almost always about just feeling good

Results: outpouring of generosity and good will for some, elaborate celebrations and spectacles; loneliness and feelings galore of rejection for others. This nostalgia leaves some families with great "togetherness", but others with loneliness as they view others from their positions of isolation

II. You Can Also Have a Religious Fictional Journey

Consider all the creches with public displays of the nativity scenes? In Washington State you can also find an atheist sign next to the nativity display, deriding all who believe in God
     No scriptural record for all this stuff: gold saucers of halo, nimbus, aureole around their heads; three kings named Melchior, Caspar, and Belthizar; three kings arriving the same night as the shepherds; riding in on camel back; one king is black, one is young, and another is old; an open stable. I wonder how camel meat tastes?
    What about coming at the winter solstice? Then the animals are all around at peace at the stable – what a romantic picture! Who doesn’t love the little drummer boy and the little crippled boy who gives his crutch and his leg is healed. Now that is a great story
    Just one problem with all this…there is simply no such record in the Scriptures.

What do we really know biblically of the "wise" men? With transliteration, they were magi, or ‘magoi’. Magoi is plural, but we still do NOT know how many of these men came to Israel from the East. (Magoi is an undefined term, but you could do a little research in the book of Daniel.) My pastor’s best guess is that there might have been twenty or so of them!
    What we do know is that they came from the east; they were following a supernatural star looking for the one born king; they stopped to question Herod (who asked the scribes where He was to be born – and Herod never did see any "star"!); but the star re-appeared and stood over the place where the child was; they found Jesus as a child, not a baby, with His mother and worshipped Him
    They found Him in a house with His mother-no mention of Joseph; they gave Him gifts; they were warned in a dream not to talk to Herod again; and they went back to their origins without telling Herod a thing
    In Babylon and Persia there was no king without the blessing of the wise men. They were astrologers, magicians, philosophers, teachers, advisers and elders of the nation. Daniel became one of them. Chaldean history says that they were instructors of kings. If they came from far away, such as Persia, they probably came with an "army" to protect them from the Romans, although the Romans had a lot of problems outside of Israel at that time. We read that Herod was so "troubled" that he had sent his army to help the Romans elsewhere. As a king he was an underling under Caesar. Here comes a bunch of king-makers with a large guard and Herod was home alone! He couldn’t and didn’t see any star. What to do? He asked the Jewish scribes, and later decimated the landscape of children of the right age to "remove" the kingly threat to himself. I think Isaiah 59 would be helpful here.

What is the acceptable boundary for fictionalizing? Where scripture is concerned, we have the opportunity to be discerning without liberty of fictionalizing, and to defend the faith with the TRUTH in gentleness and reverence. Let’s tack on 1 Pet. 3:15 here.