I assume you have Christmas rituals that you honor most every year. How many of you open all your presents on Christmas Day? How many of you open all your presents on Christmas Eve? How many of you open one present on Christmas Eve and the rest on Christmas Day? How many try to open only one on Christmas Eve and end up opening more?

These rituals, all our rituals, define us to some degree. The things we do intentionally, or repetitively, tend to be like windows into our hearts. They say a lot about our values. If something is worth doing repeatedly, then it must have some worth to us.

Rituals are also rocks, or anchors that we tether to when words aren't enough or feelings aren't trustworthy. The rituals invite us back into the familiar so we can find our bearing again.

Even more, the rituals are teaching tools. For those of us who are parents or grandparents, the things we do intentionally or repetitively are the things that we must really want our children to learn and remember, since the children are far more likely to remember events and observances that are imprinted by repetition than they are likely to remember isolated instances. For example, more than twenty Christmas Eves spent at our family's church in Washington State has left a huge imprint on me. While I can hardly remember each of those services, how well I remember all of them. Together, they make a mark so indelible that I can't imagine spending Christmas Eve without going to church, and I'm even willing to go four times in a day!

This Christmas season, we've been asking, "How do we do Christmas on purpose?" instead of letting Christmas do us in. One Sunday, we talked about shopping and giving, and finding meaning at the mall. One Sunday, we talked about the gift of receiving. Another Sunday, we talked about the part that singing plays in our lives, especially at Christmas. This last week, we talked about gathering, reunions, and reconciliations as part of doing Christmas on purpose.

Tonight, I want us to celebrate ritual. From the Advent Candles to the greenery; from the choirs and bells to the traditional carols; from that quaint evocative story of a baby born in a stable to the declarations of the angle chorus - here we are again. There might be a few here tonight for whom this is all new, but for most of us, this is a retelling. It's a meaningful ritual and a notable tradition to be here tonight. Some of us can't imagine not being here. For some of us, this is a chance to reassert our faith and values, and even to pass them on to our children and grandchildren. This one night might change their lives forever, but, more likely their lives will be different because we came here again and again and again.

Realize, that I grew up on the tail end of a generation that basically scorned rituals, shunned ceremonies and tore down institutionalized customs. At school graduations, streakers interrupted the pomp and circumstances to the delight of the students. At weddings, we wrote our own vows, rejecting the time-honored words and replacing them with our own spin on what it means to be married. Even in church, my generation wrote thousands of new songs and pressured churches away from old, traditional hymns and instruments and rituals and ceremony. Our greatest glory was in the shallow genius of the extemporaneous. If someone wrote out a prayer and read it in public worship, we considered it disingenuous and stiff, not spirit-led. We became so skilled at spontaneity that we virtually ritualized it - only to find our earnest repetitions shallow and tinny compared to the deeper layers and tones of those rituals we spent years debunking.

Now our children make a big deal about graduation. Now our children ask to say the very same vows at their weddings that their grandparents said - "For better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; to…" The discerning ones see in us the sickness of our disdain for rituals and traditions and disciplines, and they lament the costs of our untethered freedom. If our generation's genius is in our spontaneity and agility, our curse is to skim around like waterbugs never breaking the surface.

By the way, shallow ritual is as mind-numbing as shallow spontaneity. The Old Testament prophets and Jesus Himself make it very clear that mindless, heartless, disengaged rituals are the stuff of bad religion.

So what's the stuff of good religion. For tonight's purposes, I'll say that its learning to do often the things that are worth doing and learning to do well the things we do often. There are some things (like praying and giving and learning and serving) that are so worth doing that we format our lives around patterning these things in. We create rituals that help to imprint ways of thinking and living, so that our better impulses are coaxed out of us and our worser impulses are overrun by the better. Even more, we orchestrate experiences like worship that are designed to make an encounter with God likely, and if the experiences are successful, we reload and do it again - ritual. And there's nothing more transformative in our lives than repeated encounters with a Living God.

Our children, of course, thrive on rituals. How often have I been scolded by our six-year-old when I've tried to do the bedtime ritual out-of-order. There's security and pleasure in the routine of PJs, teeth, book, pray, words of affection [our ritual], shushing, and sleeping. It's like a dance, and if Daddy doesn't get the steps right, something's not right.

Seasons come and go. She won't always want me in her bed. Some dances, like the Macarena, have a short life. Other dances, like the Swing, come in and out of fashion and then in again. Other dances, like the Waltz, have a timeless value. All in all, though, we thrive and learn and we teach more and better when we understand the value of rituals. And even when our little one stops asking me to lay and pray with her, I hope she'll never forget that I'll love her for always. If something's worth saying, or doing, it's usually worth saying or doing a lot.

Now, I know that many of us have Christmas rituals that virtually ignore the truest meanings of values of the season. The other stuff isn't bad. But for some reason, the other stuff is easier to reinforce and ritualize, because our culture is doing it with us and doing much of the work for us. Dear parents, the smallest efforts at reading the Bethlehem story, putting out a manger scene, playing the traditional carols on the radio, or even having a birthday party for Jesus - the smallest effort repeated again and again will leave a mark and make an imprint. One day, the glitz and glimmer of the other stuff will lose some magic; at some age, we all start looking for deeper, truer meaning. This is where it's found - in a manger, a feeding trough, where a brave girl laid a baby who would show us the face of God and change the whole world. That's worth remembering and talking about and singing about again and again and again.