|
 |
 |
A Word with You Text:
Luke 2:20 It's Christmas Day and Christ is born! It's the first day of the week and Christ is risen! This year it's Christmas and Easter together! Glory be to God on high! Alleluia! While insurance companies offer service from the cradle to the grave, in Christ God offers the gift of life from the Christmas cradle to beyond the Easter grave. He offers this gift to you through his Word. And so we take this moment together that He may have “A Word with You.”
A Word with you. This, however, is not just any word. This is a singular word, a remarkable word, Jesus, the Word made flesh. And this Word is literally “with you” as the prophet Isaiah named him “Immanuel” which means “God with us.” This is Christmas, his human birthday even though he is also alpha and omega, without beginning and without ending. This is Sunday the day of his heavenly birthday being raised from the dead, even though heaven was always his home. Christmas and Easter are of one piece and tell the whole story.
In this story it seems the angels get the best parts. In the skies that first Christmas they sang with joy, “Glory to God in the highest.” In the ears of St. John “the revelator” they sing of the risen Lord, “worthy is Christ, the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing” [Rev. 5:12 (ESV)]. The story of Christmas, the story of Easter, the message of salvation is filled with angelic joy from beginning to end. Today there is joy to be had. Yet we find ourselves thinking the joy is either there at the manger or there in heaven, anyplace else but here in a world still filled with heartache and fear.
And that's the real problem with Christmas, is it not? It always seems to be for some other place or for someone else. We're always dreaming about the ideal Christmas, “just like the ones we used to know. Where treetops glisten and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow.” The Christmas we dream about always seems better than the one we experience.
Maybe that's why so many have such a hard time with Christmas. We have such high expectations that maybe this year we'll be able to put it all together—just the right combination of gifts, music, food, and people that will make our holiday merry and bright. But we never quite pull it off that way, and so for many people Christmas is depressing.
I'd like you to “have yourself a merry little Christmas” too. I'd certainly like your yuletide to be bright, and I'd like all your troubles to be out of sight. After all, merriness and brightness have their place, but Christmas goes far deeper than that. The Word that comes to us means to convince us that Christmas is not for somebody else or someplace else. Christmas is for you, whoever you are, right here and right now.
While the angels seem to get the good part at Christmas and Easter, it's hard for us to identify with angels. Better for us, maybe, is to draw our eyes down out of the heavens for a moment and consider the shepherds. They're more like us. Not such important people, quite down the social ladder of their day. Their job wasn't an easy one. It meant constant vigilance, long days and lonesome nights under the open sky. It wasn't a fancy job, to be sure, and not many young boys dreamed of growing up one day to be a shepherd.
But it was to these lowly shepherds that the angels sang. Not to kings or emperors or a panel of judges on “American Idol.” They alone were given the angel's message, “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David”—who, by the way, was a shepherd, too!—“in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.” And more than just the report of the Good News, the angel put the shepherds in motion as he threw in an incentive to go find the child: a manger, he said, would be the clue as to where they could see him. Though they, like us, were down-to-earth, ordinary guys, as Luther said in one of his Christmas sermons, an angel of the Lord came by and made them (and us!) apostles, prophets, and children of God. And this is the joy that happens to us, too.
The shepherds teach us that lasting joy can be found in the calling in which God has placed us. For when they had seen the child, Luke records, “They spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child… The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.” There was joy for them in the manger. But then they returned, taking their joy with them as they went back to their work and routine.
All-too-soon you'll return to your routine too—husband, wife, son or daughter, executive, homemaker, student or whatever. But whoever you are, there is joy for you this morning—not in some future aspiration or some other situation, but right here and right now; not in that special white Christmas you remember from your childhood; not in family gathered around the table or good friends and good food and good fun, as precious as those things are.
But, rather, there is joy found first on this planet of ours in the face of a newborn in Bethlehem, which was the very face of God. There is joy in this One, Jesus, who came to bear the sorrows and the burdens of all the world in his own heart, which was the heart of God. There is joy in this One, Jesus, who took all our hurt and guilt into his own body in his death, which was the death of God. There is joy in this One, Jesus, who broke the power of death and brought life and immortality to light through his empty tomb, which was the unstoppable power and life of God.
There is joy for you today, whoever you are, because today is the celebration of Christmas and Easter together. There is joy today in his Holy Supper, where he gives us to eat and to drink of the very body and blood born first of Mary, given as the final offering and perfect sacrifice for sin, and “after making purification for sins he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” And from that exalted place he now raises up all who put their trust in him with new life and new joy. Joy to the world! Oh, come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant! Oh, come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord! ___________________
| |
