Presented December 13, 2009
Those of you who are into sports, have you ever watched a football game with someone who doesn’t do sports? Maybe there’s a great play where the quarterback tosses it to the wide-receiver on the other side of the field and throws it deep for a touchdown. And your friend, who doesn’t do sports, says, “Did you see the referee’s hat? It doesn’t match the other referee’s hats.”
Because they don’t know what to look for, they miss the real action.
Or in hockey, you’re watching Crosby draw a penalty, and the non-sports person is wondering why they always have to stop the play just when it’s exciting. They miss the action because they don’t know what to look for.
If you don’t know what to look for you can miss the action in sports.
Or what about those of you who enjoy the arts? A friend of mine once told me a story of his trip to Pittsburgh to see Phantom of the Opera. He’d never been to a Broadway show before, so he had trouble following what was happening. And if you know Phantom, you know that the characters are performers in a show. It’s a show about performers in a show. A show within a show. As they were performing the scenes where they were on stage, giving and receiving instruction, my friend thought the actors and actresses were so bad they had to be shown where to stand by some of the other actors. So he asked the stranger beside him, “What are they doing? Are they supposed to be doing that?” Needless to say, the stranger was not pleased with his impropriety – asking foolish questions during a performance.
If you don’t know what to look for, you can miss the action in sports and in a Broadway play.
It’s the same way at Christmas.
Sometimes people go through Christmas thinking it’s about Santa, the gifts, the food, the snow, the decorations, and family. I love all those things. Especially Santa! But believing those things are the meaning of Christmas is as crazy as thinking football is about the referee’s hats and Phantom is about a stage show.
If you don’t know what to look for at Christmas, you will miss a lot of the action.
Maybe that’s why so much of the Christmas narrative, as told in the King James and the New American Standard is filled with the word, “Behold.”
This podcast gives us Five Things to BEHOLD at Christmas.