As our time rolls on, as we move forward, God, in the fullness of time, the right time, enters our world as a child, becoming fixed in our reality, limited as we are, in order to adopt us, redeem us, make us free children and heirs of God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, the feast of the Name of Jesus; texts: Galatians 4:4-7; Psalm 8; Luke 2:15-21

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Well, we’ve done it again.  We’ve traveled all the way around the sun once more, and are starting another revolution today.

Obviously, we had nothing to do with this.  The earth in its course makes its own way around our sun, along with companion planets, asteroids, planetoids, and other space debris.  It takes our planet 365 and a quarter days to make this journey.  We’re just along for the ride.

And of course, it’s completely arbitrary that today is the day we say we start a new turn, a new journey.  Yesterday, or tomorrow, could just as easily be the first or the last day.  Or any day.  For the Chinese, the new year begins sometime between late January and late February on our calendar. For the Jewish people, Rosh Hashanah is a date on the Jewish calendar which moves in our fall months, and many other cultures have many other days which they’ve designated as the day the new year begins.

Still, this is the day we’ve all learned to call the first day of the year, and so it is.  We’ve made it another time around the sun, and we call it a year, and time rolls on like an ever-flowing stream.  We find so many ways to keep track of this flow, from the smallest of nanoseconds to millennia, because knowing where we are in time, what minute, what hour, what day, what month, what year has become very important to us.

So it’s interesting that in the reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians assigned for the feast of the Name of Jesus, not for New Year’s Day, Paul speaks of time, of all things.  “In the fullness of time,” Paul says, “God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, . . . that we might receive adoption as children.”   For Paul, part of the wonder of this Son of God was in fact his entry into our time, our counting, our stream.

As we begin a new year, then, it is good that we remember today that the God who stands outside our stream of time has entered it, at just the right time.

But first, let us say that there is in fact a wisdom in stopping on whatever day we call the new year, and not only celebrating that we’ve come this far, but celebrating the journey through time itself and giving thanks to God.  Most cultures do this, instinctively it seems, since such observances are found all the way back to the dawn of civilization.

So we join our many and varied ancestors in taking a moment today to look back and forward, and to ask God’s blessing in that looking.  To give thanks for another year lived in God’s grace, and to seek God’s presence and strength for the next year to come, should we all survive it.

This taking time to worship as we remember that we are in a time we do not control, a time which flowed before us and will flow beyond us, ages upon ages, is a wise practice, and deeply important to our life of faith.

As the psalmist has said, “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”  Teach us to recognize that our time is limited, countable, and beyond our ability to control, we pray on a day like today.  We gather here today in humility at our smallness in the vast sea of time and space, marveling at the speed at which this yearly journey seems to run the older we get, grateful for God’s ever-present help in all our days, months, years, lifetimes.

But then into this remembrance, we have this odd little eight day counting today, which on the surface might seem like nothing.  But consider what we are saying.

I’m not sure we’d be gathering to celebrate the festival of the Name of Jesus if it didn’t also happen to land on what we call New Year’s Day.  It’s a very common practice for Lutherans to worship on either New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.  But as we’re considering time at this start of a new year, this other time of eight days is a pretty significant intrusion, which teaches us a great deal.

It is eight days since we celebrated the birth of the Messiah, Jesus, our Lord and Savior.  Since he was a Jewish boy, on the eighth day of his life, as Luke dutifully records for us, he was circumcised, as a mark of God’s covenant with Abraham and his family.  And at that same time, he was given his name, Jesus, “God saves.”

The Church in its wisdom has seen fit to call this a festival day, the first one counting time after his birth, but certainly not the last, as we now spend almost half the Church Year walking through the life and ministry of the Son of God.

We claim a great deal about this baby whose birth we are now celebrating, whose circumcision happened on the eighth day.  Son of God, we say.  Very God of very God, begotten, not made.  The Word of God made flesh, now living among us.

This then, is the marvel of this simple noting of eight days today: the eternal Son of the Father, present at creation, beyond all time that we can fathom, suddenly is in an earthly countdown.

Think of that.  Is there any way to count the days of the Triune God?  Annual birthdays?  Ridiculous – in the first place, God is not limited to our solar system, so a year is irrelevant.  But in the second place, the Triune God is, was, and always shall be.  So, no birthday.  How about other anniversaries?  Again, no point, with the same objection as to our solar years.

God simply exists, outside of all time and space, having created a universe that lives in its own time, marking the passage.  So while beings on other planets, should they exist, would have different years, their planets having different revolution cycles around their stars, those beings are still more like us than like God.  They’re in our time.  They’re in our space.  Their star is related to our star in some way and has its own life-cycle and time-flow.

But we gather today to say that eight days after he was born among us, the eternal Son of God was circumcised.

This is a profound mystery, if only we stop and consider it.  The God for whom time does not exist has become limited to our time, so much so that we can count the days, keep track of passing time.  The Son of God whose being is beyond understanding and transcends all dimensions has subjected himself to a surgical procedure on a human baby’s body.

Suddenly, this Son of God, existing before time, has a birthday.  Anniversaries.  Yearly celebrations.  This Son of God ages, for the first time ever.  Bleeds, for the first time, ever.  Has to light candles when the day turns to night, for the first time ever.

The God beyond all time and space is now stuck in our timeline, on our planet, along for the ride with the rest of us.  And that’s an astonishing thought to think.

So when we gather to mark a new year and give thanks to God, coinciding with this strange little remembrance, we are faced with a huge question: why would God do this?

Noting our time as it passes actually helps lift up how remarkable it is that God has entered it.  The appointed psalm for today, the familiar eighth psalm, says it so well: when we consider the vastness of the creation, of time and space, it’s beyond our comprehension that the God who made all this cares for us.

This is not human arrogance, this psalm, assuming we are the crown of all things.  This is humility in seeing how tiny we are in the massive expanse of God’s creation and wondering at God’s attention and love.

When we mark a new year, gathering here to pray for the one to come, we remind ourselves how limited we are, how bound to time we are.  That we also mark this very human event in the life of the Son of God irrevocably reminds us of the mind-bending truth that God actually did come to be with us.  That God has willingly accepted all sorts of limitations for the sake of being with us.

And it is Paul who gives us the amazing answer to “why”: that we might ourselves become children of God.  God enters our time to live with us, be on this ride of time with us, that we might in turn be heirs of God, living with God.

There was no way for us to comprehend the Triune God if God remained outside our time.  By being limited in our time, in our body, in our world, the Son of God could make himself known to us, and likewise all of who God is.  And then in adopting us as children, invite us into the life that is God’s that transcends all time.

Now we belong to Christ, and this life of God’s is ours.  Now, though we still live and know time in this limited, human way, we are joined to the life of God which lives and moves beyond time.  We know God, because God became stuck with us in the fullness of time.  And that’s our joy today.

So we look to 2014, what we call a new year, with hope and promise.

Not just because we find ourselves still alive on this January 1, and not just because we’ve arbitrarily decided it was time to recognize our yearly revolution around the sun.  Though it is good and wise for us to give thanks to God for this.

But chiefly because in this child born to the world God has entered our time and become known to us, and we have found light in the darkness, hope in the despair, and joy in the sorrow of this time-bound world.  We have been joined in Christ’s death and resurrection to eternal life, life beyond time, and so we now are living as people in time and out of it.  People bound to this stream and joined to a deeper, richer, life-giving stream of God’s eternal time.

And now we continue in our time as children of the God of eternal time, and in us God’s involvement with our world, God’s connection and grace and light for our world continues.  God continues to be stuck with this world, in this time, through us.

So perhaps it’s about time, perhaps it’s now the fullness of time, that we got about our business as God’s children.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

In the midst of the horror of the massacre of the holy innocents, God is at work to save all the world from precisely this evil. God does not do this by destroying or overpowering evil, but by entering into the very heart of suffering and pain in order to bring healing and a new future.

Vicar Emily Beckering, First Sunday of Christmas, year A; texts: Matthew 13:13-23; Isaiah 63:7-9 (added Jeremiah 31:15-17 as well)

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

How horrific it is that in the wake of the birth of our savior, so much evil and death follows.

And yet, it also makes sense. It makes sense because we know from our own lives that we live in a cruel and dangerous world. We know that atrocities like the death of the baby boys of Bethlehem continue to happen in our own time.

All we have to do to be reminded of this is to turn on the TV, open a newspaper, or log in and read our news feed.  We live in a broken world where suffering is widespread and where evil still runs rampant.

The birth story of Jesus does not pretend that the world is any different.

It is not a magical story where God comes to us in the form of a baby and suddenly everything is sunshine and roses. That is not the story of the nativity because that story would in no way address the harsh realities of life lived in this world.

Instead, God comes to us and to the world by entering into the very worst that it has to offer: into a world that does not recognize him or relish in the goodness that he brings, but instead pursues him and attempts to wipe him from the face of the earth.

In Herod’s attempt to destroy his Messiah, he destroys the lives of the children of Bethlehem and their families. We need to be clear about one thing: the death of these children was not God’s will. God did not orchestrate their murder as a part of God’s plan. The slaughter of the innocents did not happen in order to fulfill God’s Word spoken to the prophets.

The fulfilled prophecies show us that in Jesus Christ, God is doing what God promised to Israel by coming as their Messiah to deliver them and give life. God the Father provides carefully for Jesus, the Son, so that this mission might be lived out.

God is at work in this story to bring life, not death, for God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.

The violent death of these children depicts the polar opposite of God. Their deaths result from evil, brought about by human fear and anger. Their deaths are Herod’s desperate and disturbing attempt to hold onto his power and position at all costs. These children are destroyed because they resemble Christ. They are persecuted because they match the description of the expected Messiah: a male child born within the time frame of the appearance of the star. The church has traditionally named these children as the first martyrs because they are murdered in Jesus’ name: they are sought out and destroyed because they reflect Christ.

Their martyrdom, however, is not to be celebrated. Those who are left behind in Bethlehem bring their grief in lament before God “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.” This is a direct quotation from Jeremiah 31:15, which voices the cries of Israel, exiled into Assyria.

These words from Jeremiah are our entrance into this story.

We may be left feeling like Israel, exiled to Assyria. We may look around us and see all the evil and suffering: the violence of wars, the destruction caused by hurricanes and tornadoes, the murder of children, or the horror of a slave industry that still holds millions captive and be left feeling like this depiction of Rachel: weeping for her children, refusing to be consoled.

We may find ourselves refusing to be consoled, refusing to be comforted by this birth of Jesus if it means that innocent babies will die, that the Herod’s of the world will still win, and that evil gets to go unchecked.

We hear the cry of Rachel, the cry of Israel in exile, but because Matthew takes this prophetic word out of Jeremiah without giving us the context, we do not hear God’s response to Israel’s refusal to be consoled. This is what follows the cry of Rachel in verses 16 and 17: “Thus says the LORD: Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work, says the LORD: they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future, says the LORD; your children shall come back to their own country.” God promises Israel that exile is not the end because God is still at work for them to bring them into a new future, a future filled with hope and the presence of their God.

This is also the promise that we find in the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem. God says to Israel and to us: we do not need to remain inconsolable in our grief, in our suffering, or in response to the world’s condition because what we think is the end, is not in fact the final end.

Israel is told that they will return home because God will bring them home. And though all that the people of Bethlehem might have been able to feel at the terrifying, horrendous slaughter of their children was inconsolable loss and abandonment, they were not, in fact, abandoned! God was at work for them, in the very midst of their terror, bringing to them a savior, working out God’s plan to free them from such forces of evil.

There was hope yet for them, and hope yet for us.

The hope is this: that in the person of Jesus Christ, God experiences the depths of our fear and our suffering and we do not face them alone.

This is precisely why Jesus Christ came!

He came because we are broken people who live in a broken world: a world where kings are able to wipe out the offspring of an entire village in order to maintain power, a world where children are gunned down in elementary schools, bought and sold as slaves and starve to death, a world where neighbors kill neighbors with machetes and where 11 million people are systematically destroyed because of their ethnicity.

In this baby, God enters into the very midst of that brokenness, is born into the same terror, and lives under the same threats to which we are vulnerable.

On the cross, God does not send an army of angels to overpower the Romans and prevent the crucifixion. This is not God’s way. We see this not only at Jesus’ death, but from the very onset of his birth. God does not destroy evil with fire, use angels to overpower Herod, or retaliate Herod’s evil with punishment by death.

God is not like Herod.

In Jesus, we meet a very different kind of king.

Instead, our Lord Jesus Christ enters into the danger himself: into the heart of the evil and destruction and pain in order to heal us from the inside out. And in the face of such horror, God is carefully and intimately involved in order to fulfill the promises made and to bring about a new future.

So what shall our witness and our response to this story be? When we look at the world and see only death, and it seems that evil has the upper hand and is winning, our confession is that this is not the whole story. God is still at work in this world and in our own lives.

 God is with us in the very midst of our pain and our suffering and our fear, working to bring life and healing on the other side of it.

We are to live knowing this is true. We are not to live as Herod, making decisions out of fear, or anger, or self-preservation. Because when we do, we wreak havoc and cause terrible suffering for those around us. Instead, we are to be the people who trust that God is at work. We are to be the people who look for where God is working and ask God how we can be a part of it.

We need not be paralyzed in the face of suffering, or attempt to take matters into our own hands because our hope is that our God is still at work.

Our hope is that though the children of God will experience suffering as a consequence for resembling Christ in the world, the most vicious plots of Herod or Pontius Pilate or even our own hearts cannot prevent God from reaching God’s children, healing us and bringing us new life.

Even when all we can see is darkness and all lights seem snuffed out, when we are surrounded by suffering and death and all seems lost, we confess in the presence of one another and of a hurting world that this darkness and suffering are not the ultimate realities and will not have the final word. God is still at work and God is still in our very midst, coming with healing in God’s wings, working to bring about a new future for all.

In the end, the story of the massacre of the Holy Innocents is the same story that we heard today in Isaiah: “God became their savior in all their distress. It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them.”

The children of Bethlehem were not saved by an angel or a messenger, but by God himself who came in full presence to save them and all of Israel, us and the entire world. God became our savior in all of our distress. It is God’s very presence that we are promised, and this presence by which we are saved.

Amen.

Jesus Christ, our true light, makes God’s home among us, leads us out of our darkness, and enlightens us to testify to his saving light. 

Vicar Emily Beckering, The Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Day; text: John 1:1-14

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Not long ago, two of my friends went on a spontaneous hiking trip in the remote wilderness of Colorado. Things began well: the sun was shining, it was a balmy 50 degrees, they had snacks packed, and plans for an enjoyable hike. As they climbed higher, however, they lost track of time. Night began to fall, and their situation changed drastically.

It began to snow unexpectedly, and with the disappearance of the sun over the horizon, the temperature dropped 25 degrees. They found themselves unprepared with clothes ill-fit for this sudden winter onset. What is more, they had forgotten their flashlight in the car at the base of the trail. It was a night without a moon, and without a flashlight, it was soon impossible to see where they were going. The snow began to cover up the hiking paths so that they could neither go forward, nor follow their tracks back down the mountain. The two lit a fire, but the snow was coming down so fast, it soon snuffed out the flame.

Shivering in the cold, wet from the snow, and nothing but darkness all around them, the direness of their situation soon set in. They were lost, tired of wandering through the darkness, and with the threat of hypothermia looming, they were afraid that they might not make it out of the woods.

Lost and afraid: these are feelings familiar to us. We, too, are a people who insist on walking in darkness. Intent on going our own way, living life as we please, how quickly we, too, become lost. We are unable to find our way home and incapable of loving the God who has created us. We are unable to leave the darkness of our fear and our doubt and our despair, and so instead cling tightly to these things in attempt to have some control.

In response to our dire predicament, God, out of the fierce love with which God loves us, decided that enough was enough. Enough of darkness, of fear, and of a world that did not and could not know the God who loved them. We needed a new beginning: a beginning that only God could bring.

We were in darkness, so light came down.

We were trapped in death, so life came down.

We did not know God, so God came to us.

God came: not in fire or in an earthquake or in some other mighty display of power, as we might have expected, but came as a baby, in human flesh, into all of our weakness and limitations. As we heard last night, by coming to live and to die among us, God became vulnerable. This, however, is a risk that God was willing to take because of what was at stake: us. God refused to be separated from us. God refused to lose us or to leave us in any form of darkness.  Jesus came for us and for all people, in order that we might know the depth of God’s love for us and be children of God who have life in Jesus’ name.

Now that God in the person of Jesus Christ has come, and died, and risen again, there is no darkness too deep where God cannot reach us. God is not far off in heaven, but here, among us. The Word became flesh and lived among us, literally, God dwelled, set up camp, tented with, made God’s home among us.

If you have ever been to summer camp, lived on campus in college, or had a roommate, then you know all about setting up a home with someone. You know that you never really get to know someone like you do when you live with them. You know that people who do not know one another before living together are not strangers for long, and those who thought that they knew each other before moving in together are often surprised to see one another in a whole new light.

Living together makes us know one another in a deeper way than we could before. When you live with someone else, there is no more hiding because everything is out there in the open to see: our habits, personality, even our flaws. We expose ourselves in ways that we wouldn’t have to if we chose to live by ourselves. If we have any say in the matter, then those whom we choose to live with, whom we make our home with and call are own, are the ones whom we long to be with and love.

The same is true for God.

For God so loved the world and longed to be with us all in a relationship, that God came to live with us. When God in Jesus Christ came to dwell, to set up tent among us, we came to know God in a way that was not possible before. But unlike us, God makes a home with those who reject him and deny him. In order to make God and God’s love known, Jesus exposed himself to ridicule, to rejection, and to death on a cross at the hands of those to whom he had come. That was the risk that our Lord was willing to take to reach us, to give us life, and to reveal his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only Son. Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection all reveal that glory: the splendor and the radiance of the love of the One true God.

By coming this way, God fulfilled the promises spoken through the prophets Ezekiel and Zechariah: that God’s dwelling place would be with people, that God would be their God, and that the people would belong to God. As we hear in Revelation: “The home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them.” Jesus in the flesh is God for you! Here is our God! Today! With us, for us, among us, in us.

In this presence of God, something happens to us.

When Jesus comes to us, he, “the true light, which enlightens everyone” enlightens us. We are brought from darkness into light, for we are made to know our God and the depth of the love that God has for us.

But “being enlightened” does not just mean that we are given knowledge or understanding. To be “enlightened” is literally to be filled with light, to be lit up. When the resurrected Jesus enlightens us, he bathes us in his light, lights us up, illuminates us. Like a lantern, we are illuminated in order that we might reflect that light, and testify to it. We become witnesses who point to the true light, Jesus Christ, who offers this light and a life to live as a Child of God to all people.

This “being enlightened” is not always something we are aware of or even feel because we do not become enlightened by our own will—the will of the flesh or of the will of people—but by the will of God. We are made into witnesses because that is the will and work of God: that is what happens when the Triune God encounters us.

And what happened to my friends on the hiking trip? They were brought from near death into life again by the light of the next morning, which led them safely from the woods to the path back home.

They were saved by light, and so are we.

Jesus Christ, the true light, who enlightens all people, has come into the world. God’s answer to our darkness is to bring light. God’s answer to our being lost is to come in flesh and blood and find us, to set up camp with us, to remain with us through the night until we are no longer afraid, and then be the light who leads us out of the woods.

Arise! Shine! For our light has come and made a home with us. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

This birth is first understood from the hill of the cross, and the vulnerability of God revealed on that hill now is more fully understood in God’s coming to us as a child, risking all to love us back, risking all that we, too, might risk transforming love.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, The Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas Eve; text: Luke 2:1-20

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

This is not a safe world.  Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking it is.  That we gather ourselves tonight in a safe cocoon of warmth and light only points out that there is darkness and cold in this world that we are trying to keep out.  You don’t light a candle in full sunlight.  You don’t put on an extra blanket in the middle of summer.

This is not a safe world.  Let’s not pretend that it is.  That we gather ourselves tonight to celebrate the coming of God into the world to save us, to save all, only points out that there is something we need saving from, that there is something wrong that only God can heal.  Jesus himself reminded us that only sick people need doctors, not well people.

This is not a safe world.  Let’s not forget that is true.  That we gather ourselves tonight to sing “all is calm, all is bright,” and “glory to the newborn King” only points out that there is much that is not calm, not bright, not filled with glory.  There is nothing remarkable about a silent night unless the world is cacophony and somehow we find a silent moment in the midst of that.

It is good, though, very good, that we’ve gathered ourselves together here tonight.  That we’ve found some warmth and light, that we remember God’s healing is come, that we claim an island of calm and glory in the presence of God.

But we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that this is not a safe world precisely because not only can we not stay here indefinitely, God also needs to be in that world as it is, not this place as we have made it.  In all our celebrations of this birth of our Lord Christ, we dare not mistake this place, this moment, for the place of God’s working in the world.  God is here, God comes to us here, we meet the Incarnate One here, yes.

But only that we might be able to recognize the Incarnate God out there, in the unsafe world.  Only that we might be able to hear the same Incarnate One calling us out into the darkness and cold, into the noise and fear, into the sickness and pain.  In this calm, light, warm, glory-filled place of healing we take rest, we open our eyes to God’s light, we are filled with a vision of what this world can be in God’s love.

But the One whose birth we’ve come to celebrate is in that unsafe world.  So ultimately, that’s where we need to be, if we want to be with him.

Here is how we know this to be true: we do not come to this manger as our first sight.  We come to this manger from our sight of the crucified Jesus.

It’s hard to remember this, since we live time in a straight line – pregnancy, birth, life, death – but seeing what was happening in Bethlehem came after seeing what happened on a hill outside Jerusalem.

Sometimes we’re told that we look at the manger and we see the cross.  In fact, our vision comes from the other direction, from the cross to the manger.  It’s not likely that while Jesus was teaching, healing, gathering disciples much attention was paid to where he had come from.  There are some mentions of contact between Jesus and his family, even locals in his hometown calling him “Joseph’s son”, but people followed Jesus because of who he was as they met him.  They learned to trust him, or not, to follow him, or not, based on what they knew of him as he was as an adult, not based on any stories of his birth.

But after the cross, and then his resurrection, things changed.  His disciples became believers that he was in fact the Son of God, that he was God.  The group of followers was filled with the Holy Spirit and became a thing called the Church.

And in the reflections of those early believers, they started to look backward.  If Jesus is truly the risen Son of God, then what does that mean about where he came from?  And that was where the wonder of this night came to be found: in realizing that the God who risked all in dying on the cross was risking all from the very beginning.  Listening to the stories of his birth from his mother, from those who knew them, the believers began to realize how profoundly vulnerable God had been from the beginning, and how important that was.

So Mark tells his story just from the standpoint of the adult Jesus, through death and resurrection.  But Matthew and Luke, coming later, reflect on the meaning of his origins, and feel a need to tell that part of the story as well.  The beginning of the story.  And then John tells us a wonder, that even this birth isn’t the beginning of the story of God’s involvement with us, that this coming of God into the world was in plan from the very beginning of time.  That God, the creator of this world, chose to come into the heart of the danger and pain to make things right.

Which is where we find ourselves tonight.

The birth of this child, this God-With-Us, is all about God’s willingness to risk everything.  That’s what the cross teaches us about tonight.

God enters an unsafe, dark, cold, hateful, sick, broken world to transform it from within.

This is not a story that begins tonight in beauty, seemingly ends badly in death, and then finishes triumphant on Easter.  This is a story from the beginning of creation, a story of the eternal God who desperately loves this world he has made but is pained beyond belief at the destruction we, God’s own children, have made of it.  A story of a world of light brought into darkness by our own actions, our own lives, a world which is not as God made it to be.

From the point of choosing Abraham and Sarah, this manger, this cross, this empty tomb, all these things were possible.  Because this plan from the beginning involved God’s risking all.  Which means that we never see Almighty God as a hapless victim, not at the cross, not at the manger.  This is the Triune God’s choice of how to deal with this unsafe world.  To become completely vulnerable to it, rather than destroy it.  To put himself in our hands, in hopes that we might thereby learn to love.

When we look at the manger from the hill of the cross we see that in this birth amongst the lowly creatures of this world God was saying, “I will come to you without any power or might, so that you can hear me, know me, love me.  Follow me.”  “Or,” as was always the possibility, “kill me.  But I will come to you in this way.  It’s the only way to life for this world.”

When we hear Herod’s reaction next Sunday to this coming of God, destroying the children of Bethlehem, we see fully the risk involved, as fully as we see it on that hill outside Jerusalem: Babies are born without power and protection, born into warmth and light sometimes, but often into darkness and cold.  And always, always, at risk from any number of dangers.

This baby, born into a world which already had no room for him, was at risk from the moment of his conception, through his birth and early childhood.  That he willingly chose to face the cross as he struggled in Gethsemane is only the continuing of the Son of God’s willingness to let us do anything to him, in hopes that we would in fact learn to love him.

Which means this: on this holy night, in our warm, light, space we have made in the midst of a cold, dark world, we are faced with a decision.

What will we do with this baby?

We can love the story, love the idea of a baby in a manger, and pretend that this is all sweetness and light.  But then we’d go out into that unsafe world with little more than a lie.  If this beauty, this quiet, this peace in here has nothing to do with reality out there, what is the point?  If God is actually doing something about this unsafe world in this birth, just loving this story isn’t getting that point.

If, however, we see that this vulnerability, this risk of God is the whole point, then this baby becomes very important.  Then this baby becomes the beginning of God’s answer to this broken, dark, cold, unsafe world.

It’s the difference between seeing this beauty, then looking at the ministry of Jesus, and then saying, “Isn’t it a shame that everything went so badly, but at least he rose from the dead,” and seeing this birth for what it is, a huge risk that inevitably led to a cross, a gamble with death, with us, in a world where so many things go badly, for the very purpose of changing that world.

Without power, without weapons, without defenses; without strategy, without plan of attack, without manipulation; this is how God enters the pain of this world.  And so that is also our path.

The wisdom of the Triune God is at once astounding and troubling, that this was the only way to bring the world back.  It was all about risk, always about risk.  The only way to make this world safe and whole was to risk being broken and unsafe, even though God has the power to make and unmake universes.

So this is our invitation: to see this as our way in the world as well.  We have none of the power of the Triune God, so in one sense, it’s far easier for us to go into this world powerless and defenseless.  We feel that way often enough already.  But we have enough that we cling to our self-built protections, we build barriers, we try to pretend we’re safe.  Enough that we need to hear what our Lord Jesus taught us not just in words but in these actions, this birth, that death.

The only way to healing, to light, to warmth, to wholeness, to peace, is to enter the pain, the darkness, the cold, the brokenness, the struggle and be willing to put ourselves wholly into it.

In that risking, the world will be healed.  That’s what our God has shown us.  In that risking, light will come into darkness, warmth into cold, peace into fighting.  It’s the only way for God.  So it can be the only way for us.

This is not a safe world.  We don’t want to forget that.

And the only way to face that is to go out into that world with our lives, our hearts, our whole being, risking all.  It’s more than a little frightening to consider.

So let’s keep our eyes on this baby who is the God of all creation, heaven and earth contained in such a little space, such a vulnerable place.  Our way is the way our God has already walked, and if we are with such a God, then we are also given the courage to risk as God has risked.

It’s not a safe world.  But we are not in it alone; that’s what we learn tonight.  If our path leads into darkness and cold, into dangerous wilds, it is also the only path where we know the Triune God has gone, and where we know we will never be alone.  And that, my friends, is truly tidings of comfort and joy.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

We long for God to come to be with us, we hope for this promise that Christ abides with us; but when our Lord comes he’s disruptive, life-changing, and thanks be to God for that.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, Fourth Sunday of Advent, year A; texts: Isaiah 7:10-16; Matthew 1:18-25

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.  He had it all in his mind how it would be: a perfect day, the whole town celebrating, a dance, his beautiful bride.  And then children, if the LORD God willed it, boys whom he would teach his craft, or girls whom his wife would teach to care for a home.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, this stunning thing of her being pregnant.  Truthfully, it wouldn’t have been so bad if the reason was that they couldn’t wait.  That had happened before in this town, and while it was humiliating for a while to be teased, it always passed and people went on with their lives.  That, he could have handled.

But this pregnancy . . .  well  . . . he had nothing to do with it.  That was the terrible thing.  That was the thing he couldn’t even bear to say out loud for fear it would mean it wasn’t just a bad dream.  For Joseph, his hopes for his life were shattered.

Or at least that’s what he thought.  It would be well for us, sitting on Fourth Advent, looking ahead to our Christmas celebrations, it would be well for us to see if we might need to learn what Joseph, guardian of our Lord, needed to learn.  Because what he learned was a hard lesson, though ultimately it was a lesson which gave him life like he’d never dreamed of.  What he learned was how God works salvation for us.  It was a hard lesson for him; it may be a hard lesson for us.  Because God does this salvation by surprising us with the unexpected, the ridiculous, even the terrible, or the terrifying.  But in that surprise we have hope, and life.  In that surprise God is with us.

We call Jesus’ birth holy, but in fact it’s a holy disruption, for his family, and for the world.

It’s a thing we have to keep in mind as we’re tempted to sentimentalize the Christmas story.  Matthew’s account is not terribly sentimental, after all.  He tells of a good man, a righteous man, who is torn between his loyalty to his fiancée and his sense of what is right, a man who seeks to quietly divorce her rather than have her stoned to death.

This threatening opening to Jesus’ story is only the start of what is to come.  Because Matthew will tell us of the cost of this birth to the children of Bethlehem.  And then he will tell us what this child, grown to be a man, became, and what he asks of us, of all who would follow him.

Jesus the child became a man who called us to take up our cross and follow him.  To give up our lives for each other.  To love our enemies and to be people embodying justice and love in the world.

This is the kind of wisdom, the way of life, this holy Child came to bring.  The disruption in his earthly parents’ lives was only the beginning.  Jesus’ whole way is a disruption of everything we are and do.

The promise Matthew makes today is that this Child will be Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.”  It’s a good name.  Until we comprehend what that means.  That’s what Joseph and Mary learned.

Once God comes to be with us, God starts talking to us.  God starts asking things of us.  God starts trying to lead us into new ways of life.  God-with-us is not a neutral, no-impact proposition.  God’s ways of justice and peace and self-giving love: this is the way Jesus talked and walked and preached.

Jesus came to lead us onto paths that lead to the life of the Triune God.  He points humanity, points each of us, down roads that are very different from our current paths and directions.

So however much we get mushy at Christmas, the end result of this impending birth is change for us.  Massive change.  Earth-shaking change.  And, like Joseph, we may not always like it at first.

What we know, though, is that the need for God-with-us is also as real as it has ever been for the world.

The readings from Scripture this morning speak of the human need for God to come and help us.  In Isaiah, Ahaz, the king of Judah, is faced with serious military threats from Israel, the northern kingdom, and from Aram, also to the north and east, and he’s facing moral collapse from within his kingdom.  Injustice and oppression are increasing among his people.

And to this Isaiah promises that a child will be born as a sign, a child called “God-with-us.”  A sign that God still cares about Judah.  But also a sign to call the nation to new life.

The time of Joseph and Mary likewise cried out for help from God.  Oppression from Rome, poverty and want: this people desperately needed God.  And the promise to Joseph today is that a child will be born, called “God-with-us”.

And even when we move forward now to our time, we long for God to save us.  How can we count the ways we are anxious and frightened?  Seemingly ever-increasing intolerance and hatred in our world and our society.  Threats of terrorism, of heart-rending violence and death close to home and across the oceans.  Soldiers – ours, and those of many nations – still fighting in wars, still far from wherever their homes are, still dying, year after year.

In more places than we can count in this world there are people ever in danger, being destroyed by others because of who they were born to be, or because of their faith, or because of any number of other things we find to hate each other about.  We who hope in the one true God want God to come and save us.  We long for this.

Advent is a time when this longing is spoken aloud, sung aloud, dared to be voiced, but this desire, this hope for Emmanuel never leaves us.  And the good news is also the difficulty, all at the same time: God does come to be with us.  But in an unexpected, and disruptive way.

There’s a reason for the disruption, though.  God’s whole purpose for coming in person was to create change in us and in the world.  This is what God means by “saved”.

And again, the clue is in the promised child’s name, now from the angel’s voice to Joseph: his name will be Jesus, which means “God saves.”  “Because he will save his people from their sins,” the angel says.

But for Jesus this isn’t some judicial exchange.  He doesn’t come simply to remove consequences or even punishment for our sins.  He comes to save us from them, God’s messenger declares.  That is, to bring us into new ways without sin.

God’s whole plan was to personally, in person, lead us away from paths that lead to sin into paths that lead to life.  That’s the world’s answer from God.  That’s how God is with us.

The answer for Ahaz and the people of Judah was to live new lives of justice in God’s ways, trusting God to save them, not foreign alliances.  This meant change for them, serious change.

The answer for Joseph and Mary and their people was to live in God’s ways and trust that God had come in person to bring about new life.  This meant change for them, too, serious change.

And it means change for us.  If we’re going to worship this Child, we must remember to worship the man, the Son of God, he became.  A man who was also God, who called us to new lives.

New lives that reflect the justice of God, that all people live safely, freely, and in peace.  When we do things or support things that do not bring that about, or that prevent such justice, this God-child, this man-to-be, who embodied such justice, this One calls us to change.

We are called to new lives that reflect the love of God, that all people have value and worth in God’s eyes, and are precious.  When we do things or support things that do not show that love, or that prevent people from knowing it, this God-child, this man-to-be, who lived that love with every fiber of his being, his teaching, his healing, this One calls us to change.

And we are called to new lives that reflect the vulnerability of God, that are willing to lose all for others, even to giving our lives, rather than dominating or controlling others.  When we seek to be in power, to be the ones who get our way, to be ones who live while others die, this God-child, this man-to-be, who himself died and rose to new life, this One calls us to change.

God needed to come because we were destroying ourselves and this world.  Because we still are.  God chose to come, to be with us, to show us the way to end that destruction and to find life.  But that meant we’d need to change.  And we don’t like that at all.  So we killed him.

But when we killed this God-child, the man he became, God overcame our hatred with resurrection life.  And now, risen, this Child continues to stand at the head of new roads, new paths, encouraging us to follow.

And that’s going to be a disruption.  But truly a holy one after all.

Because when God comes it’s usually not the way we expect, or often even want.  But it is the way we need.

As we enter our Christmas celebrations next week, let us never stop praying for Emmanuel, for God-with-us, despite what it will mean for changing us.  And may God bless us with the courage and faith of Joseph and Mary to accept God’s coming, and all the changes it means, so that through us, too, God will come to the world and continue to transform it from fear to love, from death to life.

It’s not how we thought it would be.  But it’s God’s gift of life to us and to the world.  And our Lord will be with us every step of the way on this new path, thanks be to God, because that’s his name, after all.  God-with-us.  Emmanuel.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.  Amen