A week ago, our family celebrated Levi's "Gotcha Day" at Disneyland. We stayed long enough to watch the holiday fireworks show at Disneyland with Seth and Emily. Each year I am reminded how hollow the secular "holiday season" is. Don't get me wrong. The fireworks display was amazing to watch. It really is spectacular. It's the content that's bankrupt. Here's what you hear if you're paying attention:
(SPOKEN) "Does your heart hold the magic of the holidays? Is it filled with warm memories just waiting to be discovered again? Now is the time to open your heart, believe in that magic, and remember those treasured moments...they're still there, deep within you, waiting to touch you once more. So come along as the magic of the seasons leads the way!"
Can you remember how Christmas makes you feel?
That special magic in the air, when all your dreams were real.
Can you remember the smell of gingerbread?
Candy canes and sugar plums that dance inside your head.
Remember when the twinkling stars at night told you reindeer were in flight,
And jolly Santa Claus was on his way?
The warmth of candle glow, a kiss of mistletoe,
The magic lives when we believe. It's in our hearts to stay.
Remember the caring, a season worth sharing.
Believe in the magic in our lives, just open up your heart,
And relive the feeling, just remember the magic,
Yes remember the magic, one more time.
Treasure it again, it never has to end
Remember the magic in our lives
Just open up your hearts, embrace all those feelings
Just remember the feeling, yes remember the magic
For all time
(SPOKEN) "Cherish the holidays forever, and always believe!"
"If we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object."
I agree and think that the feeling that surges through the crowd as the fireworks explode and the music swells and the "snow" (read: tiny soap bubbles shot out by high tech "snowmakers") falls is related to this internal longing. Lewis goes on...
"Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s (the poet) method was to identify that desire with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If he had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
You see? SIGHT is the letdown. FAITH is where it’s at.
Christmas is not like that. When Jesus was born, the FAITH of so many became SIGHT. Like Simeon and Anna and many others who recognized that this Jesus was no ordinary man, but God in flesh appearing. He had come to turn dreams into REALITY.
This is what sets Christian faith apart from the kind of BELIEVING we hear all the time. Our faith is in something concrete. SOMEONE real. Who really lived. Who really spoke like no other man. Who really died willingly on a cross and prayed “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Our faith is in this man who came back to life and ascended into heaven and promised to come back the same way he left. VISIBLY.
There was an old light beer commercial – “Tastes great! Less Filling!” That’s the Disneyland, “who-cares-what-you-believe-in, just-believe” kind of belief. It can make your heart swell for a moment and give you a warm feeling and make you want to hold hands with someone, but it doesn’t last and it won’t ultimately satisfy you.
The Christian faith understands and is confident in God’s promise that one day, the thing our hearts ache for and that we long to experience will be SIGHT. We will see Him forever.
"There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God (Hebrews 4:9)."
When will we enter it?
When "the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17)."
Now THERE'S something to believe in. I'll take that over sugar plums and gingerbread any day.
