Christmas by Heart and From the Heart

Ever experience the tyranny of the too-familiar? Knowing something so well that you lose the joy of experiencing it for the first time? Ever wish you could live through Christmas once again with the wonder of a small child? I had such an experience in Marburg, Germany, a few years ago during a sabbatical year from my university.

Germans at Christmas tend to go home to their families and forget about strangers. Other folks at the university were in the same situation I was, looking for companionship during the holidays. A veterinarian from Ethiopia told me he had no personal contact with Germans other than shopkeepers. A Chinese gynecologist and a Korean psychologist told me similar stories.

Thank God a Christian ministry planned a holiday dinner for international folks like us that promised more than food. The members of Christus-Treff prepared a full turkey dinner for more than a hundred guests. They also staged an after-dinner skit that promised to explain the true meaning of Christmas.

Three Chinese scholars played the “three professors from the East.” Even the ersatz camels in the skit were international guests. The highlight presentation, however, came at the end. Roland Werner, leader of Christus-Treff, carried a heavy sports bag on-stage and looked out at the audience.

“Is there anyone here whose native tongue is Korean?” he asked. “How about Arabic?”

As guests raised their hands, Roland invited them to join him on stage. For each he pulled a book out of the bag and showed a place to read from when their turn came. When he called out “English,” he signaled me to come up. He handed me a Bible open to the same verse as all the others.

When we 20-odd native speakers assembled, Roland asked us to read the verse in our own language. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life." Fired by a spark of benign nationalism, each passionate reading received a thunderous round of applause.

By the time it was my turn for the English translation, I felt so inspired that I closed the Bible and, as one of my German friends later said, offered the King James version of John 3:16 “by heart and from the heart.”

As I left the stage, the three wise men bowed to me ceremoniously, and said in broken German, “That was amazing! You look at that for thirty seconds; you got it cold!”

I certainly want that to be the only way I ever quote Scripture again—by heart and from the heart. And that’s the only way I ever want to tell the Christmas story.

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