Sermon for Christmas Day, December 25, 2024
Isaiah 52:7-10+Psalm 98+Hebrews 1:1-12+John 1:1-14
As we always do, we gathered last night for our Christmas Eve liturgies, singing O Come, All Ye Faithful, lighting candles during the singing of Silent Night, and hearing the familiar Christmas story from the gospel of Luke with the census and the baby Jesus born in rough surroundings and angels and shepherds and all the rest. There is something warm and familiar about this telling of the story, something we think we can grasp, something manageable.
But there was nothing humanly manageable in this story. I think we have lost something of the shock, the unexpected, because it has become so domesticated that even children can dress up in costumes and act it out for us. But that God would come to us, revealing God's very self to the most insignificant people in an area of the world under the brutal rule of an empire, and that a host of angels would tell this to shepherds of all people.
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. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.
(Luke 2:10-12)
In its retelling through the centuries, maybe we have lost the ability to be surprised that God would behave in such an ungodlike way.
This is where John comes in. John does not have shepherd and angels and mangers and Mary and Joseph. No, John starts at the beginning. Not the beginning of this story but at the beginning of the story.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
As much as I love the excitement and joy of Christmas Eve, this is when Christmas truly begins for me. God coming as one of us was not just some last-ditch effort on God's part to bring humankind back into the fold. It was the plan from the very beginning.
In Hebrew, the word dabar (דָבָר) has a dual meaning. It is the word for word, and it is the word for deed. To say something is to do something. When God spoke creation into being at the beginning, those words did something. They created. God's saving word was intended for the salvation of humankind in and from the beginning. And now that salvation has been enfleshed in the person of Jesus who was with God and who was God. And this God - this Word - pitched a tent in the neighborhood and lived among us. It is hard to escape the magnitude of that, the astonishing way God chose to speak us into the story of eternity. Into the story of divine love.
Last night, the choir sang a setting of the ancient text, O Magnum Mysterium, set to music by the 16th-century Spanish Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. The text speaks to the great mystery of the incarnation
O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord,
lying in a manger!
O blessed virgin, whose womb
was worthy to bear
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!
It might sound like a bit of a cop out to call it all a great mystery, but sometimes, being awestruck by the inexplicable is a good and proper response. It is all beyond our grasp, and yet it is ours. God came for us to dwell with us, to live and die for us, and to rise again so that we, too, might live, glorifying God forever. In the words of Athanasius of Alexandria, “he became human that we might become divine” (On the Incarnation 54).
On Monday, we sent out our schedule of Christmas services in which I included a poem by the late poet laureate of Great Britain, John Betjeman. These are the last stanzas of a longer poem called Christmas:
And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare —
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.[1]
In a little while, we will come to this table and receive the body and blood of Christ, of the one born in such humility in Bethlehem, the one who loved us so much from the very beginning, who longed so much to be in relationship with us as to become just like us, in the flesh. O magnum mysterium, indeed.
Merry Christmas, friends. May this same Christ be born in us again and again.
[1] From Christmas, John Betjeman (d. 1984, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom)