Christmas Eve Sermon

Christmas Eve sermon, given 12/24/2010 at the 11 p.m. Service

Millbrook United Methodist Church

“When Jesus told his stories he was often misunderstood, so misunderstood that the very people he came to save with his deepest love were the first to turn against him. It may not have been because they did not understand him as his disciples did not understand him, but that they understood him too well. They couldn’t stand his having turned everything upside-down and inside-out. It threatened their power...Because of their insistence on the law, their power depended on keeping everything right side up, everything in its proper box, put on the shelf in the right order. If they let him turn things inside-out it would be the end of their power. So they began to hate him.”

“He was surrounded by throngs, but how many heard what he actually said, rather than what they expected him to say? ‘Who is he?’ they asked each other.

“They found only paradox and contradiction. If we think of Jesus as the Son of God as any young man is the son of his father, we anthropomorphize. Perhaps because we are human beings, that is inevitable, is the only way we can understand. But it is far more than that. He is the Son of the One who created the stars in their courses, and yet, as Christ, he was Creator of the stars and without him was not anything made that was made. We will never understand with our finite minds that, yes, he shouted the magnificence of the universe into being and yet, as Jesus, came to our little blue planet as an ordinary mortal.”

“Everything is more than it seems, and we get occasional glimpses, revelations, but when we try to analyse and explain them we lose them. Angels were his chariots, and he rode upon the wings of the cherubim, and he is further away from us than galaxies billions of light years away, and he is as close to us as the beating of our own hearts.”

“He is with us because of a love beyond our comprehension, and it is only through our own love that we are able to know him at all. And it isn’t even our own love; it is Jesus’ love, expressed through us.”

“So, what has happened to us?”

“Why are we not alive with joy?”

- from Bright Evening Star by Madeleine L’Engle.

One of my favorite things about Christmas is that once a year we get a very clear reminder: we are reminded that God doesn’t keep records or tally up accounts, nor is God concerned about our gender, economic status, who we love, or our position in life. If God were concerned about any of those things, I don’t believe that Jesus, the image of God made human, would have been born in the disagreeable and poverty-ridden circumstances that he was.

The Christmas story is a story of universes colliding, of paths intersecting, of a budding love affair. It is where we find the divine and the human coming together. It is about God breaking into our world to show us the love we have always been capable of since creation, but the love we forgot how to do.

If it weren’t for Christmas, we might never fully grasp the intensity of the love God has for us.

We would think that such a love could have been much more effectively communicated through another set of circumstances. In the Christmas story, we have Mary and Joseph, far from home because of imperial rule, a peasant mother married to a hard-working carpenter, giving birth in unsanitary, substandard housing. There was no fanfare, no royal delegation, none of those things we would deem appropriate for such an announcement. His parents just laid him in that manger and they watched his face, held his tiny fingers and toes, and listened for his breathing, just like every new parent does. And we ask - that’s it? That’s all?

The story couldn’t be more appropriate. On that night in that little town of Bethlehem when God and humanity were joined, we discover that true love accepts us for who we really are. God chooses to love us precisely because we are humans and we too are capable of great love, not because of social standing or economic power. Christmas upends the letter of the law, takes everything out of its right-side up box, and tosses it off the shelf of power. No, it’s not about what we have done of accomplished of can be; Christmas is about love, pure, relentless, unconditional love, a love that embraces you and me, and tells us there is nothing we can do to stop it.

That little baby born in less than ideal conditions two thousand or so years ago is proof of the immeasurable love that God has had for all of us from the very beginning.

Near the end of his life, that famous theologian Karl Barth was delivering lectures at the University of Chicago Divinity School. At the end of a captivating lecture, the president of the seminary announced that Dr. Barth was not feeling well and wouldn’t be able to finish the lecture series. The president thought, though, that Dr. Barth would like to be open for questions, but that he shouldn’t be expected to deliver long answers. The president said that he would ask just one question on behalf of all those gathered.

He turned to the renowned theologian and asked, “Of all the greatest theological insights you have ever had, which do you consider to the be greatest of them all?”

It seemed to be a most appropriate question for a man who had written tens of thousands of pages of dense, erudite theology. The students held their pens and pencils against their writing pads, ready to transcribe the astute insight of one of the greatest theologians of their time.

Karl Barth closed his heavy eyes, tired from age and illness, and he thought for a minute. Then he smiled, opened his eyes, and said to those young seminarians, “The greatest theological insight I have ever had is this: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so’.”

Christmas is the living promise that we are never alone. No matter where we are in life, no matter in what condition we find ourselves, no matter how far we might stray away or how unfaithful we are, there is a love made known in Jesus that will envelop us for all eternity.

Yes, Jesus is with us because of a love beyond our comprehension, and it is only through our own love that we are able to know him at all.

So, are YOU alive with joy this Christmas eve?

© Evan W. Dodge, 2010.