How to Rejoice At Christmas When Family Feels Tender

On Gaudete Sunday, that third Sunday of Advent when the world lights the joy candle — Gaudete meaning “rejoice” in Latin — it’s our third son, Levi, who stands at the front of the church to preach the Christmas sermon wearing a thrifted flannel plaid shirt and a pair of faded jeans with an old leather belt.

Rejoicing is only sustainable if you can find joy in a story you’d rather get rid of.

Levi first clears his voice, and his lapel mic crackles, and he says that when he was asked to preach, the pastor said he could take whatever tack he chose.

Rejoicing is only sustainable if you can find a meaningful joy in a story you’d rather get rid of.

And because he and his brand new bride of a mere six months are artists, they are going to tell us a story, Aurora illustrating Levi’s words.

But instead of starting with Once upon a time, he starts more like the way Truth always begins: “Once upon a Tree…”

And as he outlines the family tree of Jesus, his bride begins to draw, and our son chokes up speaking of the God who keeps having his vulnerable heart broken by His people who reject Him, lie to Him, wander far from Him, get bored with Him, betray Him — brothers who rape sisters and families who live with incest and lusting liars who begin affairs — and Aurora’s drawing this family tree of God, writing bold at the end of one tree limb: liar …and then another tree branch reads: prostitute … and then: murderer, bastard, adultery….

Branch after branch: unfaithful.

By the time Levi says God doesn’t whitewash his family tree, but comes to our dark to seek and save the lost, everything’s blurring for me because I know a family tree that has branches of mental health dysfunction and alcoholics, whole branches of broken marriages and nervous breakdowns and atheism and estrangement and deep shame and all that is me.

God doesn’t whitewash any of the brokenness in His family tree — but He goes to Calvary’s tree to wash us all clean in spite of our brokenness, to graft into His family tree.

I’ve been the faithless, and one who comes from a long line of the faithless, but all that matters is:

God doesn’t whitewash any of the brokenness in His family tree — but He goes to Calvary’s tree to wash us all clean in spite of our brokenness, to graft us into His family tree.

Who does this? How is this actual reality?

Levi’s choking it back, as Aurora draws wanderers who are gently brought back to the narrow way by the crook of a shepherd’s staff, and then Levi says something that rents me right open:

“The people God breathed life into, made for intimate relationship with Himself, made in His image, they kept wandering away, rebuffing Him, rejecting Him —- but God didn’t remove Himself from their story.”

And all this wet gratitude spills down my cheeks and I’m brushing it back with the back of my hand, and all the messy people who are honest with their less than perfect, painfully messy stories are undone:

What could ever be more moving than God never once removing Himself from our story?

What could ever be more moving than God never once removing Himself from our story?

This is the gift of Christmas:

God doesn’t remove Himself from the part of your story that reeks to high heaven, that you’re the most desperate to move the furthest away from the shame, the heartbreak, and the messiness.

God doesn’t remove Himself from the place in your story that everyone else moves away from, shies away from, turns their faces from.

Where everyone else abandons and removes themself from your story — is exactly where God moves closer to hold and restore you in that part of the story.

Dung happens … and dung happens to be exactly where God enters the world.

Family trees twist …. And God isn’t for a moment ashamed of your family tree because His own family tree is worse, and He goes to Calvary’s Tree to defiantly graft you into His family, His heart, His love that straightens everything out in the end for all eternity.

Others may try to remove you from the roster of the righteous, or remove you from the who’s who of those who have made it, who are good enough to be blessed and favored, but God moved Himself out of heaven, to move into your worst dung heaps to prove His love for you is unmoveable.

Others may try to remove you from the roster of the righteous, or remove you from the who’s who of those who have made it, who are good enough to be blessed and favored, but God moved Himself out of heaven, to move into your worst dung heaps to prove His love for you is unmoveable.

That’s what the story of the manger proves: The Divine Love of God wants to be with us in the dung heaps of our stories, and the muck of the manger fertilizes holy hope for all our mire.

God never removes Himself from our story — but moves closer to restore and re-story us —- which is the most moving part of our story.

My heart aches with this burning thanks.

And it’s after Levi takes us from the creation of Eden, to the crèche of Bethlehem, all the way to the cross of Calvary, that he then invites the whole congregation up to the table of communion — that he comes back to take his wife Aurora’s hand, so they can come to the Communion Table together.

And I’m walking behind Levi and Aurora toward the bread and the wine — when I notice exactly what belt he’s wearing with his thrifted shirt and worn jeans.

He’s wearing my father’s belt.

My father’s same old leather belt that I can remember him wearing since I was four. That same braided leather belt Dad bought when we moved to Texas for a tender few months of solace after my baby sister Aimee was crushed and killed in our farmyard.

That same 45 year old belt of my father, who we unexpectedly lost just over three years ago, in the same place, and the same way, as we lost my sister.

On the way to the communion table, I reach out and gently touch the back of Levi’s belt… touch my father’s belt.

It’s on Gaudete Sunday, the third Sunday of Advent, the Joy Sunday, my third son preaches a sermon-story that spans the family tree of God, right past all of our Christmas trees, right to the Calvary tree of restoration… while he’s wearing the belt of the man in our own family tree who was held together by this belt for decades after the traumatic grief aftermath of my sister being killed — until he heartbreakingly left this world, killed the same way she was.

Yet: There isn’t a painful family tree in the world that God can’t powerfully redeem.

There isn’t a painful family tree in the world that God can’t powerfully redeem.

Because the tree of Calvary roots every aching family tree in the soil of hope to bear the fruit of joy – and all our sorrows have a way of making all our joys taste sweeter.

Because God knew, before you were born, that He would break into time and come as the Word into the world, to restore and re-story every part of your story.

Because in the midst of tender Christmases, in the midst of every single one of our traumatic stories: There is always a way to still rejoice because God is always restoring and re-storying us.

There is always a way to still rejoice because God is always restoring and re-storying us.

Rejoicing is always possible — because God came to the Creche, to go to the Cross, to make all our re-storying possible.

Because even now, after everything, there is a story that holds us all together, rooted in the One who “will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit…and … He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist” (Isaiah 11:1-5).

And all our tender Christmases, and all our messy stories, are faithfully held together by the belt of his righting love, that never removes itself, but moves closer to re-story us.

In these last waiting days of Advent, after family dinners round the table, Levi loosens his belt — and all of us find ourselves bound closer to God, all the flickering candles dancing their brave rejoicing in the dark.