David Jeremiah - Sights and Sounds of Christmas

Our world today rarely listens anymore unless there's a crisis of some sort. "But every year," my friend Buechner said, "there is an annual illustration of this same deafening silence at Christmas time". You see, during the Christmas season, businesses increase to a frenzied pace. Canned carols blast over all the din of traffic. Bells jingle. Red-robed Santas freeze in Chicago. And then suddenly, night falls on Christmas Eve. The last shop closes. All the hullabaloo is over, and everything is silent for one brief day. It's unlike anything else in all of culture. For 24 hours, our world shuts down to celebrate something so magnificently wonderful that we have not recovered from it in over 2,000 years. The obscure birth of a peasant child, seemingly insignificant in its time, reaches across the years to command our attention.