By George “Chip” Hammond
If your church is closed on Sunday, Dec. 25, but you want to worship that day, I warmly invite you to join us at Bethel. If you are the pastor of a church which is closed this Christmas Day, I invite you also to come. If you’d like, you may remain anonymous. It is not my place to judge you or your church. I want only to extend an invitation to those who would like to worship on the Sunday that happens this year to fall on Dec. 25, and do not have a place to do so.

Please do not think me harsh or uncharitable if I observe that to forgo gathered worship on a Sunday, the day of Christian worship since the time of the apostles, because it happens to fall on Christmas is rather to miss the point. What is the point of Christmas if not to mark and celebrate the birth of Christ into the world for us and for our salvation? What is the proper response to that, if not worship?

Our Roman Catholic friends make worship on Christmas one of their Nine Days of Obligation. While few Protestant churches do so, surely it makes more sense to worship on the day we celebrate Christ’s birth (even if it is not on a Sunday) than it does to cancel Sunday worship because it’s Christmas day, the day we mark Christ’s birth.

In 1816 the Scottish poet James Montgomery wrote the hymn “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” When it was published in a collection entitled The Christian Psalmist in 1825 it quickly “went viral” in churches throughout the English-speaking world at Christmas time. In the refrain we are exhorted again and again to “Come and worship, Come and worship, Worship Christ the new-born King!” Why should we?

There is a line in the original poem that we seldom find in our hymnals. It is a verse that reduces me to tears whenever I read it. The line is this:

Come and Worship.
Sinners, wrung with true repentance
doomed for guilt to endless pains:
Justice now revokes your sentence,
Mercy calls you – break your chains.

The Son of God was born in the weakness of human nature so that He may taste death for everyone (Hebrews 2:9). God sent his Son in “in the flesh” (frail human nature, weakened further by our sin) so that in Him God could condemn sin “in the flesh” (Romans 8:3).

Note Montgomery’s words carefully, because they contain theology that is as beautiful and stirring as they are true. It is not mercy that revokes your sentence, but justice. If you are in Christ, your sin has been punished in Him; God’s justice is satisfied in Him. If you are in Christ it would be unjust of God to condemn you. And God is not unjust.

That, my dear friend, is reason to rejoice, and reason to delay presents and pie until later in the day. Christ has been born to us.