The Start of a Beautiful Relationship
Posted on in Sermons by The Rev. David Marshall
Luke 2:1-20
(Note to Reader: The recorded version of this sermon was given on Christmas morning. I was inspired to make several changes to the sermon so the text doesn’t match.)
On a cold night, in a humble stable, two thousand years ago, God became human. God humbled God’s self, limited God’s self, and poured God’s spirit into a human infant. That is the remarkable event that we celebrate tonight. On this night, with our beautiful music and sincere prayers, we are not claiming that a man became God. Rather, we are celebrating with awe and wonder that God was willing to become human.
The amazing, radical, wonderful event that we celebrate tonight is that God became human by being born to a young woman, in a stable, a room meant for livestock instead of people. Jesus Christ was born in that humble shelter so that you and I might know God.
Christmas is not just a good story. The birth of Christ is not a fairy tale that we tell to our children. The significance of this night is that in the Baby Jesus, God is revealed in a new way. God is not a set of laws that we must live by. God is not a philosophy that we must accept. God is not an idea that we must understand and believe.
God does not seek our belief. God does not want or need us to believe. No, God wants to be known. God wants to know you and love you, and in return, God wants you to know and love God. God became human so that we may know God personally, intimately, and profoundly.
And so, the wonder of Christmas is not that a man became God. The wonder of Christmas is that God became a man. God became flesh, human, and experienced the struggles, hungers, sorrows, frustrations and the grief of being human. Jesus was a man. He had friends, enjoyed parties, and drank wine. He suffered losses and enjoyed successes. He was angry, and he was happy.
He was human and he was God. And because of that, God is present to us and with us in a new and wonderful way. We can know God.
The promise of Christmas is that God has entered into creation, but it seems to me that we often get confused about what that means. We want to escape from this reality. We hope that by becoming more spiritual we can somehow escape from the struggles and suffering of life. But that’s backwards. The promise of Christmas is that God is now present here, in this reality, transforming our struggles and our suffering with love. This is where salvation is found and known. God meets us here, in our lives, transforming fear into hope, grief into peace, sorrow into joy.
Christmas is a day when we celebrate the best in human character as we celebrate the gift of Christ’s birth. This is a time of generosity and altruism. We donate toys for tots and food for hungry people.
This morning the newspaper ran a story about a group of three families who helped their elderly and poor neighbor replace the leaking roof on her house. There was also the story of a miraculous healing of a young child suffering from an incurable disease. I don’t know if these stories happen more around Christmas, or if we just are more interested in them at Christmas time, but a question we ask each year is, how can we spread this Christmas spirit to the rest of our year: Tomorrow and the next day, and the day after that? How do we experience God’s loving presence and participation in our world?
At St. Dunstan’s Church we do that by feeding the hungry with our Tent City 3 feeding program and our contributions to the Greenwood food bank. We experience God’s presence through our prayer shawls ministry and through our care teams, responding to people’s needs with help, prayers, cards and visits. We do God’s work in the world through our women’s guild and their support of outreach ministries. We experience God’s presence through our work together on projects like building a stained glass window. Most importantly, we experience God’s presence in our worship, our music, and our prayers. The most beautiful worship of the year is reserved for Christmas.
This night we celebrate the start of a beautiful relationship. This night is the start of a beautiful love affair. This night, this Christmas night, we celebrate God’s love in our lives and in our world.
Merry Christmas!
The Rev. David Marshall
St. Dunstan’s Church
December 24th, 2011
