(upbeat music) - Welcome friends to this episode of the "Everyday Educator" podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I'm excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I'm super excited to welcome you to this Advent podcast, and we are drawing ever closer to Christmas, and the excitement at our house is palpable, and I bet it is at your house as well.

We are going to talk today about some questions and some thoughts and some wonderings that you might want to share with your own family. If you're looking for some great conversation starters about Christmas and about the spirit of Christmas, about the whole Advent season, you might want to use some of this to start a conversation with your family about the mystery and the wonder of Christmas.

I have a guest today, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I'm gonna tell you, my guest is my husband, David. He's a pastor, and he is one of the best people I know at finding the hidden riches in scripture, especially in familiar stories that many of us swallow whole without chewing anymore.

And after years of reading and hearing these stories, we just might be missing something significant. When something is super familiar, I don't know if it's true for you, but this is how it works for me. When something is super familiar, I take it in sometimes without letting it touch me or change me.

Certainly, none of us want to do that with the Christmas story. David, thanks for being with me on the podcast today. - It's my pleasure. Glad to be able to be here with you. - He watches or listens to me do this every week, and I think he wants in on it, and I want him in on it as often as he'll come and be with us.

All right, let's talk about Christmas. A lot of times, I hear this phrase bandied about, and so do you probably. Christmas is really for the children. Christmas is for the children. But David, why is that not quite right? - It's funny that you and I are on the same page here, particularly with the idea that Christmas is for children, and it is for children, but it's not just for children.

- Good point. - Growing up, I was always kind of baffled by Christmas because people got so much excitement about Christmas, and I never caught that excitement myself. - Like friends in the neighborhood or at school or at church or stuff like that? People like that? - Yeah, yeah, just the neighbors and just the whole culture seemed to be so excited about Christmas, and I always felt like I was missing something.

- Okay, like somebody else knew a secret you didn't quite know the whole truth of? - Well, people were into it in ways that I just didn't understand. - Gotcha, yes, yes. So they were excited about this or that, and either you weren't excited or your family didn't participate in the excitement that way or you just didn't totally get it.

- Yeah, and the family I grew up in, we celebrated Christmas, of course. - Oh, yeah. - It didn't seem like a magical, special time of year. It just felt like, yeah, this is just what we do. We get with family, we exchange gifts, and we do decorating leading up to the holiday and maybe some special cooking, but it seemed to me to be missing some crucial element that I just, and I've actually, as an adult, tried to capture, even as a pastor, trying to talk myself into being excited about the Christmas season.

- Right, right. I know that when we first got married, we had different expectations about Christmas, and I've come to understand that it is because of our different experiences of Christmas as children and in our families. - Yeah, that is true. We had different experiences growing up, but we've been married a whole lot longer than we were children in our families.

- Right, exactly, that's what I was thinking, too. - And so I've tried to figure out what, well, in the words of Charlie Brown, what Christmas is all about. - (laughs) Yep. - And, of course, Linus points Charlie Brown to the Christmas story from Luke chapter two. - Right.

- But that is certainly part of it, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. - Ooh. - And so it's easy for children to get excited about beautiful Christmas trees and special Christmas parties and meals and Christmas presents and Christmas events like Christmas pageants and concerts. - Yes.

- And so, but that only goes so far. I mean, that seems like it's excitement that's just generated on the human level. - Well, and there's lots of external stimulation for that kind of excitement. I mean, there are bright lights and twinkling lights, and there is loud Christmas music everywhere you go.

- Yeah. - And there are big Christmas trees and big lighted neighborhood installations. You can hardly miss it. - Inflatables. - Yes, oh my word. There's lots of external stimulation and everywhere you turn, it's all about Christmas all the time, the trappings of Christmas, the sights and the sounds and the lights and the songs.

- Yeah, in some way, some of those trappings can obscure what's really going on. - Yeah. - I always find New Year's Eve to be completely generated out of whole cloth, all the excitement about New Year's Eve, 'cause like we count down and then it's gonna be New Year and we're so excited.

It's like, yeah, but we didn't, I mean, we know it's coming and there's no real surprise there. - Yeah. - And there's no real wonder of changing the number on your calendar. And so I've always felt like that was just kind of ginned up excitement about something that's not real.

- Yeah. - And I don't want to feel the same way about Christmas, that it's just something that's ginned up that's not real. - Yeah. - And there needs to be more substance to it. And that's what, that's kind of been my quest as an adult trying to understand Christmas on more than just the intellectual level.

- Yeah, I will admit, freely admit that my favorite Christmas special growing up and even and to adulthood was Charlie Brown Christmas. And when you were talking, I kept thinking, I could hear Lucy's voice in my ear. You know, Christmas is run by a big Eastern syndicate, Charlie Brown.

And so I see what you're saying. It's a lot of trappings and a lot of stuff and a lot of commercialization and a lot of taking over of the Christian message. But then you do have Linus and I remember memorizing Luke two from hearing Linus. - Right. - All that, all those years ago from hearing that.

And that does bring the wonder back. So I hear what you're saying. I bet all of us as parents feel that pain. - Well, I think that Christmas, we said a lot of people think it's just for the children and in the same way that doing chores is just for the children.

Well, actually do chores to keep your home functioning and clean. And so you don't get your seven-year-old to sweep the floor because you think it's gonna be extra clean when the seven-year-old's through sweeping. You just get them to go through the motions, but you're teaching them something that's more important.

It's a life skill they need to know how to do. And so you start with the stuff that they can understand and realizing that there's something more important underneath that. And same thing with Christmas. We have Christmas trees and Christmas presents and songs and festivities and lights on the street and all that, and that's fun.

I think that's good. But that needs to lead us to something that's deeper than just a lot of outward glitz and excitement. There's nothing wrong with that unless the glitz obscures what is really the heart of Christmas. - Yeah, yeah. So how can we, as parents, as citizens of heaven, as Christians, as believers, as seeking people, how can we make the Christmas story, the Luke 2 Christmas story, and all the things that led up to the Luke 2 Christmas story, how can we make that fresh again?

What is there that we might still have to discover? - I think you said it well. We're so familiar with these stories. It's Luke 2 and Matthew 1 and 2 where we find the heart of the Christmas story. And we're so over-familiar with the Bible passages that we, as you say, chew it up or we swallow it without tasting it as it were.

And we're so used to these stories that we don't ponder the meaning of them. And if we can really dig into the scripture and try to understand more of the context in which Matthew and Luke were recording these stories, I think that we're gonna find way more depth than we ever realized was there.

- All right, this is cool. This is where I was going. This is what we want. As parents, we want some talking points. We want some ideas. I know that you have been thinking recently about how the Christmas story has mystery and wonder about it. Talk to us about that.

What kinds of things should we re-examine or what kinds of questions should we be asking our children or pointing them to so that we can have some real good conversations that bring us back to the wonder that is Christmas? - Yeah, I think just pondering what the actual stories say, even on the surface level, when we ponder what's there, and when I say the surface, what I mean is without doing a lot of biblical background study and cross-references to Old Testament passages.

- Right, right, right. So don't have to study it. - Right, but there's a lot of value in that. But even if you don't wanna go to that trouble, just imagine what it must have been like for, in Matthew, Joseph is betrothed to Mary and turns out she's pregnant.

Whoa, wait, what? Now, of course, you need to be age-appropriate how you talk about this stuff with children, but that's part of the Christmas story. You have an unwed woman who's pregnant and her fiance wants to be kind to her, but knows the noble thing to do is to quietly call off this wedding.

And how must Mary have felt? Did she try to tell Joseph what was going on? Probably she tried to, but, or maybe she didn't because it was revealed to Joseph in a dream that his soon-to-be wife was pregnant with a child by means of the Holy Spirit. And the angel tells Joseph in the dream that he's to name this child Jesus.

And so one thing we can do with our children is read the stories and how do you think Joseph felt? I mean, he was surprised. And one thing to think about is that according to Luke, Mary, for the first three months of her pregnancy, she was gone to visit her cousin Elizabeth, the old woman who was suddenly pregnant for the first time.

And so Mary's been out of town for three months and comes back to Nazareth and, "Oh, she's pregnant, huh." And so we can just think about how these stories must have really felt in real time. - Yeah, I was reading this story with a friend of mine recently, and her observation was there's a lot that's left out.

There are a lot of details that are left out that you just think, I guess, that that was not the important part of the story, but it bears some thinking about. I mean, here is this young pregnant woman who is going to ride a donkey a long way to pay taxes.

So like, what was that conversation about? I mean, Mary did it, she did it. She went with Joseph, but you know they must have had some conversations about, now you want me to do what? Now, come again, now where are we gonna stay? Do we have a reservation? You know, all of those details, you can talk to your children about that.

When you chew on some of those specifics that they can relate to, they can relate to a long trip. This was a long trip, not in a car to grandma's house. This was a long trip over desert places, on a donkey, going with hordes of other people to this little town that is not used to taking it.

This is not Orlando with the Disney hotels. This is a tiny place that's not used to taking in a lot of people. And so if you just look at those kinds of details, it helps humanize the story somehow. - It really does. And we can relate to those things much better when we really take a minute and think about them.

And because the stories are so familiar, we just kind of say, well, yeah, you know, they went from Nazareth to Bethlehem. We all know that, but to imagine what it was like brings out a lot of depth to the story. But even beyond that, this is a bizarre story.

Here's a woman who's not married, who's pregnant and hasn't ever been with a man. And her betrothed, her fiance, is committed, because of communication from an angel in a dream, he's committed to taking care of this woman who society said, yeah, just kind of push her aside. So that's bizarre.

And so then they have to travel, like you said, about 80 miles to Bethlehem from Nazareth. And there's nowhere to stay. When they get there, the baby's born. Okay, you know, these things happen. But then that night, there are these strangers that come up and say, oh, we heard that you had a baby.

And he's, Christ the Lord, really? - I mean, if I was that young mom, I would be like, who are you? What are you doing here? And how do you know that I just had a baby? I did not send out birth announcements. I don't know how, and how do you know this is Christ the Lord?

- Well, they show up, which is weird enough, as in our culture, they're really awkward. But then they tell this weird story. Yeah, angels appeared to us out in the pasture, and the glory of the Lord shone round about us, and we were so afraid. - But you know, Mary and Joseph, I mean, to us, that would be super weird.

Like, if angels appear in the backyard, I'm gonna be a little taken aback. But Mary and Joseph, I mean, they both had been visited by angels. So when these guys tell 'em that angels appeared to 'em, they're probably, oh, cool, okay, happened to us. - Well, the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together.

And the weird stories keep happening, because then they go to dedicate Jesus at the temple, and again, in Luke chapter two, and they get a lot of attention from a guy named Simeon, who says, oh, the Lord said that I wouldn't die before I saw the Christ, and here he is.

And Mary's thinking, okay, well, in fact, Luke tells us that she stored up all these things in her heart. But these are just strange events. Then Anna comes up and corroborates Simeon's story. And then they, a few months later, when they're in a house in Nazareth, then these magi, these astrologers from the area of Persia show up, and they're like, and they give expensive gifts?

Well, so these are just, these are bizarre stories, and we think about them happening. We realize that this is, these are weird, weird stories, but none of that is as powerful as the story of the incarnation itself. - Yeah, yeah, it actually makes sense for the story to be unusual and unexpected because the meaning of what happened is so unusual, although it should have been expected.

There are lots of prophecies about it. I mean, I agree, it totally did not look like what anybody was expecting to happen. - Well, they were looking for a Messiah, and when they found out, when people said this was Messiah, that was great. But this is not what even the Jews of the first century expected from a Messiah.

- Right, they were not looking for a baby born in a barn. - Yeah, and even if they were looking for a newborn king, the king was gonna grow up and, through physical human strength, throw off the oppressors, and so the life that he lived, I mean, so much of this is unexpected, but when we just ponder the whole idea that God could be born, he's the creator of the world, and Matthew makes the point through his literary references that Jesus is the new Jerusalem.

He is the light shining. He is heaven on earth. And it's another iteration of God working to bring heaven on earth. He started in the Garden of Eden, and that didn't work out. Then he finally called Abraham, and Abraham did okay, but he had his own flaws. But heaven on earth was reattempted through the tabernacle in the wilderness, and so this portal, as it were, the portable place where God has his special presence, and that was something that the Jews carried with them and then created a temple to house God's presence, but all of that only went so far, and now we have in a baby, in a person, here is God's presence among us in a special way, and this is supernatural.

This is very mystical stuff, and so when we only try to understand stuff on the scientific level, it's like, oh, what was the star of Bethlehem? Well, we had these planets in conjunction and blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's fine, but when we really ponder what it means to have God coming to earth as a human, as a defenseless child, that just blows our minds, and I think we just need to ponder that.

- Right, what does that signify? That God came to us as a baby, and how, you know, one thing that you said resonated with me, Jesus came to be the light of the world, so how was this baby a light of the world? A light to the world? Those are questions to talk about with your family.

How did it usher in a new era? How did it forge a new relationship between God and His people? How was it a light, and what does light do, and how did Jesus do the work of light? How did He shine in the darkness? How did He illuminate things, and how did that all start with the baby?

- Yeah, these are all questions that we need to take some time and ponder, just think about what it means for Jesus to be the light, and it's not just a light for the Jews, but a light to the nations, to the world, and you go back to Genesis 1, where the first thing God said was, "Let there be light," and light dispels darkness, but Jesus coming as a baby is God on a very intimate level.

What is more intimate than a mother and a baby? I mean, that is closeness like no other close relationship. There's a marriage relationship, but that's still different from a mother and a child, and there's a lot of tenderness there, and that's God put Himself, His Son, in a position to be the recipient of human love and tenderness, and that's how intimate God wants to be with us.

- Yeah, He wants that relationship with us, and it's really cool when you look at all the parts of the Christmas story, you see God initiating a new kind of relationship with people. You had the shepherds who are interacting with God in a whole new way. They never saw angels appear before, and they have the good news first, okay?

So, that's a way that God interacted with those shepherds. - Yeah, that's a really good point because God revealed this to the people on the margins of society. He didn't let the rich and powerful, important people get the word first. In fact, they were the ones who rejected the word, and we see that in Matthew.

King Herod and all the power brokers in Jerusalem did not like the idea of this newborn king, and Herod tried to have him murdered. - So, God, He initiated a relationship through the shepherds. He initiated, obviously, with Mary and Joseph. When the angel came to them, He was initiating a relationship of a call on them to be part of this story in a new way.

- Yeah, and that's kind of Jesus's mission. I mean, He was reaching out to people on the edges of society all the way through, and God kind of turns upside down common human sense. The rich and powerful are the people that you need to pay attention to, and they're the ones that you need to give the information to.

They're the ones that, humanly, you want to focus on, but God's story is that He is reaching out to the outcast, and in some ways, in our culture, living in the United States, we don't really, a lot of us don't know what it is to be on the outside, to be outcast, and to realize that the people who first heard the gospel were people unlike us.

- Right, right. - Who were desperate for their next meal, or who were oppressed by their government, or who had been sold into slavery. - Yeah, yeah. - And we don't identify with that, but those are the people that Jesus ministered to, and His humble beginning was, it set the tone for, 'cause He could say, "I know what it's like to be poor.

- Yeah, yeah. - I know what it's like not to have a home." - And He is initiating relationships with all of those. People. - Yeah. - And the very birth of Jesus is the initiation of a new relationship that God is eager to have with those who will believe on His Son.

And so, one really cool way to bring maybe some fresh eyes back to the Christmas story is to ask your family, what kind of relationship is the Lord initiating with you this season? How can you forge a new relationship with Jesus as you look more deeply into the Christmas story than perhaps you have done before?

- Well, and I think that we can get our children to wonder what, as parents and grandparents, we know what it's like to have a little child love you. And imagine little Jesus loving His mom, loving His stepdad, His adopted dad, loving His brothers and sisters that came along.

And to be the recipient of such pure love, and of course, other children, their pure love is not so pure after a while. - Right. - But Jesus' love for us is always pure. And if we just ponder how profoundly that can change us to be loved. I'm bad at receiving love.

And it takes some stillness, it takes some time just to let it soak in. Even love expressed by another person, we need to ponder that and receive love from other people, but we also need to receive love from the Lord. And this is what Christmas is all about. It's about God's love.

- Yeah. - And we need to take some time as adults to revel in that, to soak it in. - Yeah, that's really good. I can remember as a youth at my church growing up, I was part of a Christmas cantata with the adult choir and the youth choir and maybe the children's choir too.

And it was called "Love Came Down at Christmas." And as you were talking, it reminded me of that musical and that is true. Love came down at Christmas in the form of this baby. And I think it's well worth us pondering what kind of love was that? Explore that with your family, with your children.

In what way was God pronouncing and sharing love with us? And then I think it's worth exploring after we sit with that for a while and feel the love of the Lord, how will we reflect that love to other people? What could your family do to bring love, to spread love abroad at Christmas?

What could your response to the Christmas story be if you understood it on a deeper level this year? - And I think we need to realize that we never fully comprehend it. And if you don't grasp Christmas at a deeper level this year than last year, then you're selling it short.

There's always more. There's always more to understand about God's love for us and how He is so tender toward us. And just marvel at God becoming human on our behalf. - Maybe that's it. That's a great place to end. What will make the Christmas story wonderful again? And maybe it is to marvel at the love that God showed us in that manger so long ago.

I hope that as you reflect on Christmas this year and what the Lord is trying to share with you and show you through the story, that you will be full and that you will be filled and that you will be moved to serve. Thank you for sharing, David. I appreciate you sharing your Advent thoughts with us today and you'll come back.

- It was a lot of fun, yeah. - Yeah. And listeners, I appreciate you being with me today, being with us as we celebrate Advent together. If you are looking for ways to find community in the new year, I wanna give you one thing to think about as we go.

The classical learning cohort is a made-for-you community. As you are cultivating new skills and growing in confidence as you provide an education for your children, sometimes you are looking for a group of friends to talk over big ideas with. You can experience the classical learning cohort. There is an Ask a Mentor event that will give you a little bit of a firsthand knowledge of what to expect from the classical learning cohort if you're not sure if you want to get involved with that.

Registration is now open. So that registration is open now and it closes on the 1st of February. So think about becoming part of the classical learning cohort and you can find out about it and sign up and those classes will begin in early February of 2025, okay? All right, listeners, I appreciate you and I will see you next week.

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