Sermons: December 2009

Christmas Eve, 2009

Grace Episcopal Church

The Rev. Vern Hill 

Sisters and Brothers, we gather tonight to celebrate the birth of “God-among- us.”  Emmanuel, one of the many names from Hebrew scriptures used to celebrate the meaning of Jesus’ birth. 

With the silence of the night, with the candles and quiet peacefulness, it is easy to be tempted to leave the troubled world outside this place.  And there is so much for the Christian conscience to be troubled by - the catastrophic irony of war to make peace, the catastrophe of the homeless, of those on the street and those who have experienced the loss of income and shelter.  The catastrophe of the ancient bitterness of religious and racial and gender hatreds and fear.  The growing catastrophe of environmental illiteracy and stubborn self-righteous belief in entitlement.  There is an unease about our world, our nation and within ourselves. 

And so, it is tempting to leave it all shut outside the Nativity and pause in reverence.  But, my friends, that is not possible without committing blasphemy against the holy child of Bethlehem.   

God has chosen to make his home with us in this child - Emmanuel in Hebrew or incarnatus est in Latin from John’s Gospel - “and the word was made flesh and lived among us.”  This is truly a unique Christian notion about God,  a story about choosing and about redemption.  God chooses to come and continues to come in the child of Bethlehem to this place,  to find us when we become terribly lost from what God created us to be, when we have lost that divine vision.   

The birth story is an ironic testimony to how God in his mercy reaches out to us, meeting us in the helplessness and weakness, yet hopefulness and blessedness of this child.  A child born into the cruelest of worlds demands by that birth the World be brought here into this room where the choices can again be laid clearly before us. 

Now dangerously lurking in the shadows is a second blasphemy to this holy baby.  It is the temptation to understand this story as metaphor - to make the redemption from poverty and evil only an event of spiritual salvation.  No, this story is about responsibility and choices between that which is good and that which is evil;  that which welcomes and brings to life and that which embraces fear, which excludes and denies and shuts out.   

The World must come into this room tonight -

so that we can meet it and pray about it

about our brothers and sisters who remain the very least of these throughout the world.

      about those who are abused and harassed

about those who endure hardships and sickness and the coming of death

      The World must come into this room tonight - so that we can be mindful of those for whom we deeply care, who we gently release into the hands of God’s good grace.

The World must come into this room tonight because this is a place of magic,  not of rabbits and hats, but of expectation and anticipation.

a place where people are reborn in grace, where we gather to make for each other out of God’s gift in Christ
  •  
  • goodness    
  • justice and fairness
  • healing and reconciliation
  • peace on earth
 
This is a place, from the very gifts of this Table, where we can re-connect the broken pieces in our lives
  • Where we meet One in whom we can re-discover ourselves, where we regain  soul, where we come to see ourselves as God chooses to see us.
This is a place
  • Where we turn around (repent) and see ourselves beyond sin and fear and doubt and greed, or any of the other marks of the darkness.
This is a room filled with the magic of morning star power, the promise of new days. 

And so tonight in the simplest of gestures,
  • we listen and hear words and embedded within - the Word made flesh, we sing the songs of redemption,
  • we light candles as a testament to hope pushing back the darkness of our worst nature.
  • we gather at this Table - the divine human point of intersection, the holy meeting site for our nourishment.
  • and we offer ourselves as signs of courage and faith to those whose outlook has been dimmed by pain and fear and failure and helplessness.
 
This is a magical night, a night for birth and rebirth; a night for each of us to re-experience the incredible passionate love which God has set loose for each of us by this baby’s birth.