This past Sunday we started off our “Ugly Christmas, Beautiful Christ” sermon series that will run during Advent and Christmas here at University Lutheran. One of the reasons that I chose this as the theme for our Advent and Christmas series is that it IS going to be an ugly Christmas in lots of ways – that’s going to be inescapable. There are sick people throughout our country, institutions around us are having to make decisions that alter our normal behavior, and just in general – we’re having to embrace a Christmas that maybe feels “less Christmassy” than some before. 
But having an “ugly Christmas” is really nothing all that new. Every Christmas holds the potentiality of something that it is a little “ugly,” a little out of sorts. We know those Christmasses: the Christmas when the relationship feel apart, the Christmas when the loved one got sick, the Christmas when the job didn’t pay, the Christmas when we messed everything up, the Christmas when…you fill in the blank. And that’s ok, because the reality of the joy of Christmas isn’t found in the setting of Christmas – it’s found in the content.
After all, the setting of the first Christmas was pretty lack luster: A somewhat impoverished and most likely taboo couple is forced to travel for days in order to fulfill some governmental requirement, and while there, has a baby who is subsequently laid in a feeding trough. Later, the family is visited by rough laborer-farmer types who gawk and then go running off.
But again, the setting isn’t the good news. The content is. The manger, the shepherds, even Mary and Joseph — those are all setting. They aren’t the point. The point is the Baby. The Baby has come. The Baby is the light. The Baby is the good news. The Baby is the content. The Baby is what is beautiful – and His beauty shines in the darkness of the setting.
This Christmas will be ugly in terms of it’s setting. Of course it will. It always is. But the content, the Baby, the Savior. He is beautiful. Place your attention accordingly.