The Real Un-Hallmark Christmas Story

1 December 2025  Isaiah 4:2-6

The First Monday in Advent

“Then the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night....” Isaiah 4:5

Walter Brueggemann once wrote:

“The gospel is too readily heard and taken for granted, as though it contained no unsettling news and no unwelcome threat. What began as news in the gospel is easily assumed, slotted, and conveniently dismissed. We depart having heard, but hardly noticing the urge to transformation that is not readily compatible with our comfortable believing that asks little, and receives less”(Finally Comes the Poet, p.1).

The way it is proclaimed in many churches, the gospel is widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It leaves us unbothered, unfazed, unalarmed. The gospel is supposed to be more like a shrieking hard curveball that looks like its headed straight for your head, and you duck while it breaks and sizzles through the strike zone.

The gospel in Jesus’ mouth whipped people’s heads around because it was so shockingly new. It either made people want to kill Him, or drop everything and follow Him forever. The way it sounds in our pulpits, however, it just sounds “nice,” and the most we’re motivated to do is send the preacher a pleasant note with a gift card to Chick-fil-A.

It turns out that God really does expect us to stay married for life, and pray without ceasing, and love our enemies, and worship at the foot of a cross where a bleeding Man claims to be the Bread of Life and the Chalice of Salvation.

“In that day, the branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious…” (Isaiah 4:2) sounds very “nice,” but right before that it says this:

On that day, the Lord will do away with the finery….

Instead of perfume, there will be stench,

instead of a girdle, a rope

and instead of well-set hair, baldness,

and instead of a rich robe, a girding of sackcloth;

instead of beauty, shame.

Your men shall fall by the sword, and your mighty men in battle.

And her gates shall lament and mourn;

Ravaged, she will sit upon the ground. (Isaiah 3:24-36)

Only then does it say, “In that day the branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious.”

Not exactly a Hallmark card.

The real world shaped by the gospel is one that shatters settled realities. There may be a wideness in God’s mercy, but there is fierceness in it, too. The true story sung by God’s poets sounds so incredible as to offend reason, and outrage pew-sitters who think that faithfulness is indistinguishable from good manners. It turns out that God really does expect us to stay married for life, and pray without ceasing, and love our enemies, and worship at the foot of a cross where a bleeding Man claims to be the Bread of Life and the Chalice of Salvation. The Christmas Story is about an unmarried, pregnant teenager from the projects, and shepherds who in those days were only a short step from gangbangers and thieves. It is about undocumented foreigners and their wild astrology, who gave a false address to the authorities, and escaped the armed agents of the state who were looking for them. It is about corrupt and paranoid leaders, and uncontrolled violence in poor neighborhoods, where children were the principal victims. The bad guys in this story would keep people like Ebenezer Scrooge for pets.

It is in a story like that that we have to learn to say, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace.” Only then are we believable as instruments of peace, and our hallelujahs begin to make sense.  “Then the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night” (Isaiah 4:5). The last time God did that He was creating a chosen people (see Exodus 13:231 ff.). If we learn how to talk that way, sing the Lord’s song that way, we will be the signs that God is doing it again.