This Christmas season at Calvary we’ve wanted to listen to what others are saying about what Christmas means to them. So we hung a banner on the north side of the church, facing Lake Street, and have invited people to go to a specially-designed website (christmassurvey.com) to tell us what it means to them.

Here are just a few of the several dozen responses we’ve received:

“Christmas means celebrating the birth of Christ through giving gifts, just as God gave us the gift of his son. It also means time with family and good food!”

“A time of rebirth, hope and joy.”

“What Christmas means: busyness, shopping, parties, spending too much money, decorating, baking, extra stress, spending time with family which almost always results in a huge fight on or around Christmas. This has been true of the Christmas season pretty much my entire life. What I desire Christmas to mean: Jesus- that He is enough for me. That every other activity associated with Christmas always keeps Jesus first.”

“I’m afraid I’ve become a bit of a Scrooge over the years when it comes to Christmas. It is extremely commercialized and media hyped. By the time Christmas actually arrives I’m so sick of the advertising, the crowds of shoppers (myself included), the waste of money, the stress, and the religions trying to force their own ideas of what Christmas is that I just shut myself in the kitchen and cook all day. It’s a good job I enjoy cooking so much. I also dislike the feeling of obligation that I have to family and friends to either visit them or welcome them into my home. It’s not that I don’t like them or don’t want to see them, it’s just that I don’t want to be obliged to see them. It takes some of the pleasure of seeing them away. I know, I’m a Scrooge. Bah! Humbug.”

Several weeks ago we began our sermon series listening to what Mary had to say about Christmas. “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary said in response to the angel Gabriel’s announcement that she will bear a son, “May it be to me as you have said” (Luke 1:38). From these words of the mother of Jesus we learn that Christmas is a time to serve.

Two weeks ago we looked at what the angels said at Christmas from that famous passage in Luke 2. “Glory to God in the highest” (Luke 2:14), was what they said – or rather, what they sang. And that was the lesson learned: the angels taught us that Christmas is a time for singing and for celebrating the wonder of the Incarnation: God become man in Christ Jesus.

This past Sunday we turned our attention to another set of characters in the Christmas story: the shepherds. They’re perhaps the most unlikely characters to appear in the story of Christ’s birth. Angels we would expect. Joseph and Mary we would obviously expect. Pious and expectant Israelites like Simeon and the prophetess, Anna, we would expect. But a lowly band of working-class Palestinian shepherds! This we don’t expect, not least as those to whom the birth of the child Jesus is first reported!

What did the shepherds say at Christmas? “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (Luke 2:15). So we learn from the shepherds that Christmas is a time to see: a time to see “this thing that has happened,” the Word made flesh, the gift of the God-man, Christ Jesus.

Won’t you join us next Sunday as we continue in our series, What Does Christmas Mean to You? We’ll be taking a look at Simeon, who said, “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation” (Luke 2:29). For Simeon, Christmas is a time to . . .