A pastor makes an announcement at the beginning of the Christmas Eve service saying there will be a meeting of the church board immediately following worship. Once the service ends the church’s leadership gathers in a room to confer about what surely is a critical matter. To everyone’s surprise a visitor, a complete stranger to the church, joins them. The minister addresses him in a kindly fashion, saying, “My friend, do you understand this is a meeting of the church board?” The visitor responds without hesitation, “Well sir, after your sermon I am as bored as I have ever been!”
We gather tonight to celebrate an event so significant
our culture has divided human history into what happened before it and what
happened after.
Since the dawn of humanity we have been wondering how we
got here. The Judeo-Christian tradition
holds a Higher Being has created all things, including us. We believe this Being, whom we call ‘God’,
can be known in part through the creation God has brought into existence. Creation reveals God is intelligent, the
architect of wonder and beauty. There is
a majesty in the orderliness of creation and a mystery to its random
chaos. Both speak to God’s nature. Because God made it, all creation belongs to
God. We believe God tasks us with the
care and keep of this world.
A specific group of people – the Hebrews – encounter God
through historical events. God sides
with them to deliver them from bondage and oppression when they are enslaved in
Egypt. God promises to be with them to
guide and protect them. God reveals to
them a code of commandments for spiritual and moral living. This people comes to believe God blesses them
when the obey and punishes them when they disobey.
Over time, a series of prophets begins to understand God
in new ways. First, they say obedience
is not concerned just with outward behavior.
It must originate in the heart.
And second, they realize the punishment they endure as a people far
outweighs anything they have done wrong.
They come to understand God is ‘long-suffering’ – a word which means
God’s compassion never fails, never flags, never ends, no matter what we
do. We may turn away from God but God
never turns away from us.
And while this is a vast oversimplification, in a
nutshell it describes everything humanity learned about God prior to the birth
of a baby boy in an obscure little middle-eastern town called Bethlehem. We knew a lot about God and about God’s will
for us before then, but what we knew was not nearly complete. For us to have as full a knowledge as
possible, God had to become one of us.
God had to take on human flesh so that human flesh could comprehend God’s
very nature.
What we did not and could not understand before, a boy
happened upon by mistake one year during his school’s annual Christmas
play. This particular year the students
performed a program called “Christmas Love.”
They were all dressed in festive holiday sweaters and hats, complete
with mittens and boots and everything else you associate with this time of
year. Each student held a big cardboard
poster with a huge letter on it.
Collectively, the signs spelled out CHRISTMAS LOVE.
The first child spoke up: “C is for Children.” The second child said, “H is for Happy.” And so it went. There was only one problem and it was obvious
for everyone to see, except the child holding the M. Unbeknown to this child, he held his sign
upside down and what should have been a M was now a W. The children who could see it could not
contain their snickering and try as they might the teachers could not get them
to stop.
When it came to his turn, the little boy raised his sign,
which now read W, and said, “M is for magic.”
This elicited howls of laughter and the little boy turned bright red
with embarrassment, not understanding what he had done. But when all the children were finished and
all the cards were held high, a bright smile came over every face in the
audience. The display intended to spell
“CHRISTMAS LOVE” now unintentionally read “CHRIST WAS LOVE”.
To read the story of Jesus is to hear the story of
God incarnate, of love in action. Jesus lives
his life reaching out to the last, the lost, and the least. He demonstrates God’s wisdom by teaching the
simple, God’s compassion by healing the sick, and God’s mercy by forgiving the
sinner. He invites the prominent and the
powerless to join him in doing the work of God’s Kingdom. And in the end, he gives his very life to
expose and defeat the powers of death and darkness. The only way any of this is aspect of God’s
person to be knowable if for God to take on human flesh and show us what the
divine nature looks like lived out in our world. Short of this, we can only guess at what it
might be. Short of this, we cannot even
begin to imagine how much God loves us.
Most of you know I have had an interesting couple of
months this fall. I have been to the
emergency room four times, urgent care once, and hospitalized on three
different occasions (including a stint in the ICU at Norfolk General); all in
an attempt to deal with my blood, which seems to like to clump together and
clog up my vessels. One of my nephews
(who serves as an army medic) encouraged me to enjoy my stay while I was at, what
he called, “a very expensive, low-amenity, all-inclusive”. Well, that is one way to put a positive spin
on my experience.
I have to tell you what I went through has changed
me in ways I still don’t fully understand.
It wasn’t that I stared death in the face and survived, because that
wasn’t my experience at all. I was
deeply affected by what the prayer book so eloquently describes as “the loving
care that surrounds us on every side.”
Beginning with the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff, to family and
friends and colleagues, to all of you, I not only knew I was loved, I felt it
in a very profound way.
Don’t get me wrong, before all of this I was not
hanging my head low wondering why no one cared about me. I have always felt very appreciated and
valued. But this experience made it
real. Love and compassion made itself
present to me in flesh and blood. It would
have been easier for doctors to text a message with the results of my latest
test along with a link I could click on for further information, but no, each
came to my room to explain what he or she had learned and patiently answered my
questions. The nurses and staff could
not have been kinder or more compassionate.
And your love and concern for me was written on your faces and ringing
in your voices in a way I will never forget.
Love incarnate changes us. It has
changed me.
I never really understand those bible-thumping
churches where the preacher holds up the ‘good book’ and bellows God loves us
so much he sent us this love letter. It
seems to me the Scriptures, while holy and sacred and indispensable to our
faith, are still at least one step removed from the love made flesh in
Jesus. They point beyond themselves to
something much more profound. As one
person put it, “Action is always superior to speech in the Gospels, which is
why the Word became flesh and not newsprint” or, we might add, just a book. Tonight we celebrate God’s love made present and
known in human flesh, through Jesus Christ.
Tonight we also invite
God’s love to dwell in our flesh that we might shine with God’s light. Nothing is more valuable in this world,
nothing more precious, and nothing more necessary.
There is a story of a
five-year-old girl who is over-the-top excited to give her parents a very
special gift at Christmas. She is so
excited she wants to keep the gift a secret.
She insists her parents set her up with a box, wrapping paper, a bow,
ribbon, scissors, and tape and then leave her be. She is adamant neither can see her special
gift until Christmas morning. Well, it
may not have been the prettiest wrapped present ever, but all things considered
the little girl does a decent job. When
she is finished she places it under the Christmas tree and checks it several
times a day. With each visit the girl
becomes more and more excited and the parents more and more curious.
What has she put in
the box for them completely apart from their knowledge or doing? As Christmas gets closer and closer and their
daughter gets more and more excited about the gift, the parents’ suspense and
curiosity grows and grows. Each night, it
takes all their power not to sneak a peek after their daughter has gone to bed.
Finally, Christmas
morning comes and presents are opened.
As if to heighten her parents’ pain, the little girl insists her gift to
them be opened last. Wrapping after
wrapping gives way to one present after another until finally there is only one
left. With a joy her little body can
barely contain the girl hands her gift to her parents. They hold it.
It does not appear to have any weight to it at all. They shake the box, but there is no sound, no
movement inside.
Slowly they open it
and are startled to find the box is completely empty. They are absolutely puzzled until their
daughter jumps in their laps, wraps her arms around them, and excitedly
proclaims, “I blew kisses into it until it was completely full of my love for
you and then I wrapped it very carefully so none got away!”
Tonight we remember and
celebrate how we do not know God’s love is until it is made incarnate. We did not know how much God loves us until
God came to be with us to show us. We
never know how much we are loved until we experience that love made real
through the lives and actions of others.
And we never love the world until we let God’s love shine through us.
