The Mystery of Christmas – Sunday, December 26, 1982
This Christmas season is drawing to a close. The nativity scenes which have beautified the American landscape will be carefully boxed to safeguard their storage for another year.
The soft notes of “Silent Night” have fallen for the last time this season upon the ears and hearts of church congregations. And the gifts which symbolize the good will of Yuletide are now unwrapped.
Still, even with the abundance of music, art, and verse which focus on the meanings of this sacred holiday, the wondrous mystery of Christmas remains unexpressed.
Escaping this spoken word or any other, unsung by vocalist, unchiseled by sculptor, that which poets vainly seek to put in verse and painters unsuccessfully put to canvas, eluding yet the prose of historians and the rhetoric of theologians lies the inexpressible significance of Christmas.
This two-thousand-year-old drama of a boy-child born in a stable can only be hinted at in vague, non-concrete terms.
What dictionary contains the words to describe the internal whisperings which brought the Magi from their comfortable homes to trudge the trackless desert in search of truth wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger?
Where is the composer whose musical scores will duplicate the sound heard by the frightened shepherds as an angelic chorus filled the night air with eternal strains of hope and salvation?
And who has the artistic genius to portray with paints the wonder of that holy scene—of the infant Son of God, of royal Deity among rustic smells and sounds of a stable?
And the most inexplicable mystery of all is the cosmic riddle of existence which spans the centuries from the creation of man to the final and eternal purposes of God, a divine plan which makes an obscure birth on the outskirts of Bethlehem the focal point in the ageless progression of mankind.
Our dilemma is not without solution. There are truths which escape verbalization, but which are felt and understood. The soul has its own language, articulate and expressive, responding in more subtle speech to the intimations of divine heritage.
For while the secret of Christmas evades our best endeavors at expression, it is found at last in faith—in the faith and hope which transcend the vain attempts of word and song—and is forever etched upon the fleshy tablets of the heart.
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December 26, 1982
Broadcast Number 2,784