Some of you are already going through that this Christmas season. You’ve got some picture in your mind about what Christmas is supposed to be, about the perfect family gathering, with all the old rituals being perfectly performed. You imagine everyone gushing on and on about what a perfect gift they received, about the perfect peace on earth and good will that prevails around the hearth, about the perfect turkey and all the trimmings that will make it a meal your dear departed grandmother would surely approve of. And already you know it’s not shaping up that way. The stress is building. The family is growing up and maybe growing apart. Maybe you are fresh out of family altogether. Every Christmas carol only makes you feel the loss all the more. You are grudgingly trying to adjust.

But is any of that fair to anyone? I am not even sure it is fair to the Holy Family. Shakespeare said, Expectation is the root of all heartache. And Thomas Fuller observed, Good is not good when better is expected. Well, comparing the real to the ideal will always be a losing exercise. But is Christmas really about the ideal? I hardly think so. The whole point of it seems precisely to be that God enters the real world, blesses it thereby, frees us from our sins, and relieves us of our heartache for not being perfect.

Let’s look at the Christmas story a little more closely, in particular the Holy Family. I daresay you can hardly find a single less-than-ideal human experience that doesn’t have a point of contact with the Holy Family.

Begin with Mary. If you or your family has known a teenage pregnancy, you have a real connection to the Holy Family. Mary was likely a young girl of recent puberty when the angel Gabriel announced God’s intentions. She was already spoken for, however. The scandal of her pregnancy is smoothed over by centuries of celebration, but the news at first was, well, inconceivable. Like any other young woman, Mary no doubt had her wedding and future all planned out—idealized, don’t you know?! But the real turns out better than the ideal in this case. Go figure!

If you are a single mother, you have a real connection to the Holy Family. Joseph died during Jesus’ teenage or young adult years, leaving Mary with the task of raising several kids without haloes and one with. Does any parent out there know how hard it is to keep siblings loving each other when it seems that one of them is the perfect child?

And if you think Jesus was always the perfect child, consider that even if he were sinless, he was as much trouble to his mother’s heart as he was her pride and joy. The gospels give us very little from which to fashion the ideal intimacy that we usually imagine Jesus sharing with his mother. It seems that Mary was like any mother, always trying to protect her son and hold on to him as he was always pulling away from her to do the will of his Father in heaven. Does any mother here know what it’s like to suffer that letting go?

And if you are bereaved this Christmas, do not forget that Mary lost her son. She even watched him die. She must have wanted to stop him, but she had to come to the truth all parents must: you cannot control your children, and sometimes you have to stand helplessly by, loving them even to death.

Take Joseph next. He is an adoptive father to Jesus. He knows Jesus is not his blood child, and yet he takes him in and treats him as if he is his own. You know Joseph must have endured some sleepless nights working over in his mind how things could have come to be as they were. How many of his family and friends could have conceived of how Mary conceived the child? His manhood would have been questioned, along with Mary’s virtue. And yet his loving and noble heart kept him faithful to the task.

If you are adopted, if you have an adopted child, if you have married into a family and made it your own, even if there is a big age difference between you and your spouse—if you are in any way part of a nontraditional family, then, listen, you have a real connection to the real Holy Family.

And if you have never been married, if you feel deprived of the special love of a marital partner, and if you wonder whether there is any real connection to the Holy Family for you, well, what about Jesus? The holy child of the Holy Family was single all his life. Apparently, to be married with children is not the end-all and be-all, after all.

One final thought about real connections to the Holy Family at Christmas. Notice there is no Christmas tree. There are no stockings hung with care, no presents, no eggnog, no carols being sung, no warm fire with a Norman Rockwell-illustrated family sitting round it. They are not even at home with family. They are in a stable with straw on the ground and animals all round. If you feel low on resources, consider that Jesus’ first toy was probably a rattle carved of manger wood by his carpenter daddy. No disappointment you can feel over things not being perfect this Christmas can make you out of touch with the real Holy Family. In fact, if you want to feel close to them at Christmas, you might begin by acknowledging your not-so-perfect life.

Kim found our 17-year old daughter, Jillian, in a foul mood the other day. She asked her what the problem was. Jillian said she couldn’t seem to snap out of it. Kim asked why. She pointed to her room and said, I am just so stressed; my room is such a mess. Kim could hardly contain her glee that Jillian was actually stressed over the mess. It was an answer to her prayers that Jillian should be as stressed about her room as she. She looked around and saw the usual: clothes everywhere, nothing in its place, no path of carpet to walk on. In the corner was a chair piled high with stuff. I don’t do it, Jillian insisted; it just happens. Right.

Kim is not about to tell Jillian that the mess that is her room is something she just has to accept. The stress she feels over the mess is preventable, but it is also redeemable. And so are all the messes of our lives that stress us so. We are none of us perfect people, and so we should none of us expect a perfect Christmas.

We call the Holy Family holy, not because they were perfect but because they were receptive to the only one who is holy, the Holy One of Israel. God deigned to use Mary and Joseph as instruments of redemption. God chose to enter into the world’s mess to relieve the world’s stress. The stress of human sin would have crippled us forever had God not intervened. But God did not wait until the perfect woman and the perfect man came along in order to create the perfect Holy Family. Although Luke tells us that Mary had found favor with God, and Matthew tells us that Joseph was a righteous man, that does not imply perfection in either one of them. Holiness means being an obedient vassal and a receptive vessel for the Holy One. We are holy when are in touch with the Holy One. We are holy when the Holy One can use us in our unholiness, our uncleanness, our imperfection, in order to accomplish God’s purpose for the world.

The question for you and me this Christmas is not whether we will rise to the occasion and come closer to the Holy Family. It is not whether we will clean up the messes of our lives and families in order for God to be made known in our lives. It is whether we can learn in the midst of it to sing like angels, worship like shepherds, give gifts like wise men, and support each other like Joseph, trust God like Mary, and simply get lost in wonder love and praise like Christians of all times.

We need a new perspective on all of this. My colleague and friend, Glen Schmucker, told the Cliff Temple congregation last week about a discovery that was made at Grand Central Station in New York City a few years ago. If you go there these days, you can look up to the ceiling as you might look up to the heavens and see there on that magnificent 150-foot-high, 160-foot-wide, and 470-foot-long expanse some brilliantly painted zodiac constellations. The French artist Paul César Helleu decorated the building’s vault between 1903 and 1913. Unfortunately, over the years the accumulation of soot and grime had completely obscured the work. Now after restoration you can see it in all its intended glory.

 An amateur astronomer, however, noticed something curious as he pondered the painted vault. The whole things was actually done backwards, as if it were a mirror image of the way the constellations really are. The artist had gotten it exactly wrong, in other words. He had made a mess of things, you might say. So they inquired of the Vanderbilt family, which had commissioned the work to begin with, what should be done. Instead of trying to fix things, one of the family members suggested, Why don’t we just ask people to see that the way we are looking at the constellations, backwards, is really just the way God sees them from heaven, looking down to earth, instead of the other way around? [“Jesus’ Family Tree,” Sermon preached at Cliff Temple Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas,  Dec. 11,  2005.]

 Why not do that with the mess that is all of our lives? Why not see ourselves the way God sees us? Why not look at the Holy Family that way, too, until the frustrating words Jesus Mary Joseph become on our lips and in our hearts the tender and wonder-ful Jesus Mary Joseph? Seem inpossible to you? Remember what the angel Gabriel said: With God nothing shall be impossible.

 Amen.