This was my sermon for the Christmas Eve Service of Holy Communion at St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Aylmer, Ontario.
God be with all of you this Christmas. May Christ be born anew in you.
But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see—I am
bringing you good news of great joy for all the people; to you is born this day
in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.
·
Tonight we do what we have often done
before: gather in our place of assembly after darkness falls to celebrate an event
in which we find joy.
·
We celebrate with Word and Sacrament,
with speech and song and silence, with both light and darkness. We remember
those present and those absent from our celebration.
·
Is it odd that we gather at night? Is
it some sort of conspiracy?
·
So what is it we celebrate? Do we
celebrate the season? If so, have you seen the weather lately? There have been
better seasons.
·
Do we celebrate some sort of great
personal situation? Doubtful… because we’re here just as we are, with our
failings and our triumphs, our wins and our losses, our health and our illness,
our pains and our joys.
·
Do we celebrate power and glory? The
story we’ve read tonight includes angels and a heavenly message. It includes a
birth and parenthood. Still the message is given to a group of poor and maybe
less-than-socially-acceptable shepherds out in the field, who are told to go
and see the new born. They are given no mission to spread the word of this
child’s birth, even though they do spread the news. The child’s birth appears
to nothing unusual as births go, although it takes place in very poor
circumstances since she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of
cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the
inn.
·
The child appears to be simply a
child. He’s powerless there in the manger with nothing exceptional there either.
There are no angels attending his birth, no dignitaries awaiting the good news
of his birth, no adoring multitudes waiting to celebrate. He’s an infant boy,
doing what all infants do... and we all know what infants do. He’s been born in
a place where the animals are kept and he’s sleeping in a feeding manger. If
you turn to Matthew’s version of the Nativity, well, the Magi don’t show up for
a while yet.
·
Lots of ink has been spilled and lots
of discussion has taken place about this setting. The setting is quite ordinary
and maybe even rustic, and some still see it as beautiful in all its rude
simplicity.
·
Maybe it is a conspiracy. Maybe God
is sneaking into the world God created. There are no angelic legions at the
manger, although a multitude of the heavenly host sing praise… out in the
fields, not at the manger. There is no display of riches and honour and power,
just the poverty of a family of travelers with no place to stay and the
vulnerability of a new-born baby, a mother who has just given birth, and a
silent man.
·
Yet who know what is going on, our
hair stands on end, our eyes tear up, and our breath catches in our throats.
You see, we know the ending to the story, which lets us see the beginning
differently.
·
We gather tonight because we know the
story and we know the secret. We know where the story is going and we know how
it ends. We know a cross is involved, but we also know that the story doesn’t
end there.
·
Maybe this is a sort of quiet
conspiracy where God has gathered the needy and the troubled and the outsiders
to hear of their liberation and to remind each other of it.
·
Maybe this conspiracy includes all of
creation and has been growing all these years.
·
Maybe this conspiracy includes the
God of all creation whose glory was hidden in the straw and dirt of the manger
and the apparently normal life of a Jewish man with an exceptional message and
background.
·
You see, the conspiracy of Christmas
shows us how far God is willing to go to bring grace, mercy, and salvation. He
is even willing to send his Son to a very human situation all his life,
starting at his birth.
·
Let’s just say that salvation is an
inside job and that is the up-side-down truth of Christmas; the saving truth of
what’s going on with all those poor people at the manger… including us.
·
God be with all of us at this
festival of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus. The Good News of great joy is given
to us and the conspiracy of the Word-made-flesh is renewed.
·
No need to keep it a secret, now or
ever.
"Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of
great joy for all the people…
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