The coming of the Son of God into the world as a human child signifies not only the coming of God to be one of us, among us, but also begins God’s process of bring us back to be with God and like God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, The Name of Jesus; texts: Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:15-21

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

There was an article in the Star Tribune on Sunday that disturbed some of our members, who mentioned it to me after worship.  I hadn’t read it then, but I did when I got home.  It was about a nationally-known local pastor who was retiring, and who has a reputation for fiery preaching, for proclaiming God’s wrath on people in order to call them to confession of their sin.  Included in his preaching over the years has been his attributing of disasters, tragedies and attacks to God’s just wrath on those who suffered them.  For this pastor, this theology is rooted in understanding the sovereignty of God.   God is in charge, therefore all things are attributed to God’s will and plan, even such things some might classify as human evil or natural disaster.  This is in keeping with his theological tradition, and we certainly have heard that from others of that tradition.  Also central to his preaching has been his belief that, according to what he said to the interviewer, “if you try to throw away a wrathful God, nothing in Christianity makes sense.  The cross certainly doesn’t make sense anymore, where [Jesus] died for sinners.” [1]  In this, he’s in line with one of the theologies of the atonement the Church has sometimes held, that Jesus’ death appeases the just and righteous anger of the Father in our stead, substituting for our punishment.  Without Jesus, according to this theory, then the wrath of the Creator would pour out on us like flames of destruction.

C. S. Lewis reminds us that theories of the atonement aren’t necessary to receive the benefits of the work of Jesus in his death and resurrection, just as one doesn’t need to understand how food is good for us to be nourished by eating.  While this is true, how we understand God’s attitude toward us and the world is an important part of how we live our faith.  If we believe God’s attitude and reason for coming among us was love and a desire to bring us back through love, then we might also be open to the possibility of a relationship with God, that is, if God wants such a thing.  If we believe the coming of Jesus was to deflect from us the just wrath and anger of the Father, then we’ll love to be with Jesus, but God the Father might possibly remain a frightening presence to us, which raises all sorts of questions about faith in a Triune God, or at least loving a Triune God instead of one of the Three apart from another.  So while we don’t need to know how the Triune God effects our salvation through the life, death and resurrection of the Son as long as such salvation is accomplished, it might affect our lives as disciples profoundly to try and understand just what God was and is doing.

To that end, listen to this alternate understanding of the reasons for the coming of the Son of God among us, in this ancient antiphon sung by the Church on this day, the eighth day of Christmas, the day of Jesus’ circumcision and naming:

“O admirable exchange: the Creator of human-kind, taking on a living body, was worthy to be born of a virgin, and, coming forth as a human without seed, has given us his deity in abundance.”

O admirable exchange, or as the Latin would say, “admirabile commercium,” a marvelous transaction.  Here the understanding is that there is a deep mystery in the coming of Jesus which entails an exchange, a transaction: the Creator takes on human flesh, and in turn, gives us divine attributes, divinity itself.  Echoing Paul in Romans 3, who said that God’s righteousness becomes our own righteousness when God takes on our sinfulness, this is a view of God that is very different from a wrathful Father who is appeased by the Son’s death.  And on this feast day of Jesus’ naming, the Church chose to sing about this wonder, this mystery, that the coming of the Son was God’s loving attempt to restore us to what we were meant to be.  Eight days after Christmas, where we celebrated God’s coming among us as a human child, now we are reminded of the second half of the transaction, that we in turn are given deity, are made godly, by this coming.

Of course, beautiful or no, the question for us is, is this true?  Does the wrath of God have anything to do with us?

There’s no question that the Scriptures speak of God’s wrath and sovereignty.  Many times God is described as furious with our sinfulness and wandering.  You don’t have to look very hard in the Old Testament to find examples, going all the way back to the story of the flood.  God is described as hating human sin.

And likewise, God’s always making claims to be in charge, to be in control of the world.  As the Creator of all, the Scriptures attribute all things to God’s will and plan.  God punishes in Scripture, God forgives in Scripture.  But God does it.

Yet this only tells part of the Scriptural story.

It only tells half of God’s attitude toward the world and fallen humanity.  It misses the constant reminders of God’s love and grace toward us, even in our sin, as we see throughout the Old Testament, like when in Hosea God waxes greatly in anger and then ends with poignant love and forgiveness.  It misses the grief of God after the flood which leads to God’s new plan to lead a family into a relationship with God that will eventually bless the whole world.

And it only tells part of God’s sovereignty, missing the reality that God leaves us to choose our own sin or goodness and doesn’t always intervene.  Cain kills Abel, and that is not God’s will.  Human sin is so great, and not of God’s will, that the flood happens.  David has Uriah killed, against God’s will.  Talking about divine sovereignty is far more complicated than claiming all things, evil and good, to be part of God’s plan and will.  Sometimes, the Scriptures say, God limits God’s own sovereignty.

So the point would be finding an understanding of God’s view of us that encompasses all of what the Scriptures say about God and humanity.  That would require a great deal more time than we have for a sermon, so what if we just look at the readings assigned for today and see what we can see?

Today the message of Scripture speaks not of appeasing wrath, but of divine searching, divine loving, and divine inheritance.

Whatever we might say about God’s wrath over our sin, the psalmist this morning has a different view of God’s attitude.  The psalmist is filled with wonder that God loves us, even that God notices us at all.  Compared to the grandeur of creation, who are we?, we sang today.  Yet, the psalmist believes that in fact, we are so loved by God that we are lifted to the status of highest of the creation, higher even than the angels.  It causes us the same wonder and awe, but the first hint of God’s attitude toward us today is that somehow, against all odds, God loves and cares for us.

Paul takes us beyond awe into stunned silence, however, for Paul describes God’s action toward us as even more than exalting us to be above other creatures.  Paul says that we are in fact so loved by God we are adopted as children of God.  Paul addresses the wrath of God: we are under the law, we are under God’s judgement.

But for Paul, God’s answer is to send the Son, in the fullness of time, to redeem us by adopting us as children, not to appease God’s anger.  By joining us to the Triune God in such a way that we share the same relationship to the Father that the Son does.  So the attitude of the Father toward our sin is that it cannot stand, but the answer is not wrath which the Son needs to deflect.  The answer is sending the Son to work our salvation in order that we can be adopted as children of God.

Heirs of God, Paul says.  People who receive divinity as an inheritance, godliness from the Triune God, even as the Son receives humanity and sinfulness and brings it into God’s reality.  And now we begin to see the theology of the miraculous transaction, don’t we?

But let’s not forget the gift of our first reading, our blessing by God with a name.  When you adopt a child, you give it a name, and in Numbers that name is declared to be God’s name.

When we say, “The LORD bless you and keep you,” we are substituting, as do the Jewish people, the title “LORD” for the proper name of God as Israel knew it, Yahweh, thus avoiding even threatening to break the second commandment.  That is the name, however, God intends to be laid upon the people as a blessing.

But in Jesus we have revealed to us a deeper proper name of God, a name veiled in mystery because we cannot fully grasp it, but a name of life and hope for us: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  And even as the LORD, in giving a benediction to be used by Aaron and the priests, a benediction we use to this day, says that this benediction is the gift of the LORD’s name as blessing on the people, even so is this new name of God given us in blessing.

It should be no surprise that we receive it when, as Paul promised, we are adopted, for we receive it when we are baptized.  And in that baptism we are covered with the name of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and linked to the life and love of God in a profound way.

And we are entered into this commercial transaction God is doing, which is a wonder to us.

O admirable exchange, the Church has sung on this day.  Our joy is that it is not only a beautiful thought, but that it is also true.

It’s the only way to comprehend the full breadth of the message of the Scriptures about God’s answer to our sinfulness, about God’s reason for coming as a child among us, about God’s hopes for us as a result.

If it sounds familiar to some of you, it may be because Luther was deeply fond of this image and used the expression on several occasions.  Though it is true that at least once he understood the exchange to be a little more like the substitutionary model, that Jesus takes our punishment and we go free, in Luther’s theology the predominant way he understands this is the joyful reception of God’s righteousness that we receive in exchange for God taking on our sinfulness.

The beauty of this is that it also takes into account the Trinity as being one God, not Three individual actors who are not of one mind, one will.  This idea not only accounts for the love of the Son for us, it also accounts for the love of the Father, and the gift of the Spirit to make our adoption alive, real, to give us our inheritance fully.

And it becomes our joy this morning on the octave of Christmas, that we begin to have our eyes opened to the full truth of what God is about for us: coming to be with us as one of us that we might come to be like God, as children of God.

It is a wonder, a marvel, a miracle.  And it is the source of our joy now and always.

Now, in the fullness of time, this is our hope and our life.  May God continue to work our adoption in us, working in us that which is good and pleasing, giving us the godliness we need to look more and more like the children of God we are, more and more like this Son of God who began the transaction, who began God’s plan to bring life to us and to all the people of this world, so that God’s joy might be fulfilled.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

[1] “Fiery pastor leaving the pulpit,” Star Tribune, 30 December 2012, section B, p. 4.

The twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple spoke of his Father, and meant God; his gift to us is that we also can know our heavenly Father through him, and like him, model our lives and our witness after our true Parent.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen, First Sunday of Christmas, year C; texts: Luke 2:41-52; Colossians 3:12-17; 1 Samuel 2:18-20, 26

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

Joseph always seems to me to be a little pushed off to the side in the Christmas story, like all those Nativity icons and paintings which have him off in the corner.  He is remarkably faithful and determined to do the godly thing, but we know little about him, save that he acted as father to Jesus.  One wonders if he sometimes resented how his life was sort of taken over by this child who wasn’t his own.

It’s hard to imagine that he felt good about the episode Luke records which we heard today.  Jesus, now twelve years old, is lost to him and Mary for 3 days, and when they finally catch up to him in the Temple of all places, arguing theology and Scripture with the elders and priests, of all people, he claims he’s in his Father’s house, or as it used to be translated (and perhaps would still be better understood), “doing his Father’s business.”  His Father’s business?  Joseph wouldn’t have to be a genius to understand that this child whom he was raising as his own wasn’t talking about a house in Nazareth or building tables.

But this becomes an important moment for us, we who see the crucified and risen Jesus as Son of God and Lord of the universe.  Here, before he’s done any teaching, while he’s still a child in the eyes of the law, Jesus shows us two things: that he is imbued with the Word of God and deeply invested in knowing the written Scriptures, and that he knows his relationship to God as one of son to father.

John’s Gospel tells us that since no one has ever seen God, it is God the Son who makes the Father known to us, in ways we never could have known otherwise.  That seems to be what Luke is doing here as well, telling us that if we watch this Jesus we will see what we need to know about God, even when he is just a child of twelve.  Remember that in Luke’s Gospel there is no secret between the author and the reader about who Jesus is.  From the beginning Luke declares Jesus’ divine parentage.  But this episode not only underscores previous claims by Luke, it for the first time in this Gospel begins to draw out the implications of what it means for God to be born among us as one of us.

It may not have been pleasant for Joseph to have to face this reality, at least if it seemed a rejection of him.  For us, it means the world: Jesus not only shows us our heavenly Father; he also shows us what it means to live in such a way that we, too, are about our Father’s business.

So, though Luke and John write very differently and have different goals, this is a truth they both would have us know: Jesus shows us our heavenly Father in ways we’d never have seen otherwise.

It’s a common theme throughout both of these beautiful Gospels, but if we simply stick with Luke, from whom we hear today, it’s a major part of his focus in writing.  Throughout this Gospel, Jesus witnesses to the truth about God, his Father, in the face of a world which imagines God to be very different.

So Luke, and only Luke, tells us that Jesus at the start of his ministry linked himself to God’s servant announced in Isaiah who is anointed to bring Good News to the poor, the blind, the lame, and to bring them all life and healing.

Luke is the one who tells us of Jesus’ stories of a God who so desperately wants to bring wandering humanity back he will do whatever it takes, like a shepherd who’s lost a sheep, a woman who’s lost a coin, and powerfully, a father who’s lost a son.  Jesus in Luke shows us the love of a heavenly Father who will stop at nothing to find us, welcome us, bring us home.

This is not what we usually expect of God, or imagine.  All-powerful gods in human history tend to demand vengeance and punishment.  They don’t sit on the front step day after day looking down the road waiting for sight of their lost ones so they can welcome them back with song and feast.

When the Son of God is brutally crucified, the way the world would write the story is that an all-powerful God would destroy those who dared touch his Son.  Jesus in Luke asks the Father to forgive those who did what they did.

Again and again in this story Luke tells, Jesus reveals to us the love and heart of God for us and for the whole world, a love which crosses racial and social and gender and ethnic and religious lines, a love which is forgiving and offering life even as we are killing that love.

And even Jesus’ use of the term “Father” teaches us something unexpected about God.  There are many in the Church today who have legitimate concerns about this, people who object to using “father” to refer to the First Person of the Trinity, not only because of its exclusively masculine nature (when of course the First Person is neither male nor female) but also because there are many awful fathers in this world, who hurt or abuse, or worse.  The argument is that the word is irretrievably damaged and unusable.  But consider this: Jesus actually was and is opening up a new vision of the love of the Creator for the world, inviting us to see the Creator as a loving parent, reinterpreting the idea of parent, of Father, and showing us the possibility of a relationship of such love with the God who made us, a Father better than any earthly father or parent we’ve ever known.

And when Jesus rises from the dead, Luke tells us of his efforts to show his followers that this is exactly the way of God and always has been, throughout Scriptures, and tells them that they will be sent to witness to this love, this grace, this Good News for the world.

So for Luke, Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, affirmed by angels and by Jesus himself, gives us confidence that his revelation of the truth about God is valid and true.  We can trust what he says about the heart of God because of who he is.  At age 12, and even after he has risen from the dead, Jesus, shaped by his identity as Son of God and close to the Father’s heart, teaches us how to see and know God.

But Luke also believes that this parentage is ours to claim as well, through the work of the Holy Spirit.

Just as Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, so we are born anew by the work of the Spirit.  This is another connection linking the theology of Luke and John, where what Jesus claims in the encounter with Nicodemus in John 3 is exactly what happens in Acts 2 when Luke tells of the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost to all the believers.  So when we look at this little boy speaking with great confidence about God’s Word to aged teachers, and we see his identity as Son of God, we are seeing also our possibility, our potential, our call.

So here is what we have: Luke wrote a Gospel to tell the world of the coming of the Son of God, conceived by the Spirit, revealing the heart of God to us and living it fully in his life and teachings, his death and resurrection.

And he wrote the sequel, Acts, to tell the world that we all, through the power of the Holy Spirit, can be born as children of God ourselves, and so, too, can fully live God’s way in our life, our teaching, our witness, our love, our action in the world.

And that’s part of Paul’s grace in this reading from Colossians.

Paul urges the believers to be clothed in Christ, clothed in the way of the Son of God.

The two boys of our readings this morning embody what Paul is talking about.  We talked about Hannah and Mary near the end of Advent; now we see their sons as young boys, and what we see is that they are so embued with the Word of God, so shaped by their relationship with the Father, that it flows in their words, actions, life.

And people notice.  Even teachers of God’s law.  Both Samuel and Jesus are described as growing up in divine and human favor.  People saw these boys, even before they were fully grown, and saw the hand of God in them, saw who they were, and were admiring of them.  As was the LORD God, according to both 1 Samuel and Luke.

And Paul joins Luke in urging that we be open to the same possibility.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, Paul says, like Samuel and Jesus.  Have this word so deeply embedded in you, Paul says, it shapes you into godly people.

It’s like putting on new clothes that make you and me look different.  So we are to clothe ourselves with all these characteristics of God’s love that shaped Jesus, and so can shape us.  Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Forgiveness and love.

The model of Samuel, and even more importantly, Jesus, is that if we devote ourselves to understanding God’s Word for our lives it will, through the work of the Spirit, shape us and make us children of God.  So that, in fact, we live into our true inheritance as children of our heavenly Father.

The remarkable thing about Luke’s message is not that Jesus was remarkable, though that’s important.  He was the Son of God, and lived it fully, even at twelve.  So much so that he could confidently speak with elderly teachers and teach them.  So much so that he, even before his ministry began, could confidently claim God as his Father.

But the truly remarkable thing is that Luke claims we have the same inheritance, the same possibility to be remarkable ourselves.  The child Jesus begins to teach us today, and we will continue to learn this from him throughout his ministry and throughout our lives, of the true nature of God and God’s love for us and the world.  And in inviting us to claim God as our Father, he invites us be like him, to witness by our lives, our wisdom, our love, to the same relentless love of God who searches for ever more lost ones to welcome home.

This is our joy this morning: that we can also, like Jesus, be about our Father’s business.

Because we know, through him, and with the help of Luke, that God the Father is our Father as well, that we belong to God in love that cannot die, love that will always forgive, love that will always welcome us back.

But also we know this from Jesus, that we also can be and need to be about our Father’s business.  We have a calling, a job, a life to live, shaped by this identity, clothed in the way of Christ, in compassion, kindness, forgiveness, patience, to continue Jesus’ witness to the world the truth about the God who created all things and loves all things.

I like to think that Joseph understood this, too.  That he saw himself through this boy he held as a baby, saw himself as a child of the heavenly Father, who also had an inheritance to claim and live.  But whether he did or not, that is our gift from this boy Jesus this morning, and for the rest of our lives.  May our God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit so move in us and shape us into our identity that we, too increase in wisdom and stature and so reflect the truth of God’s love to a world deeply in need of it.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The Triune God’s song has been playing since the beginning of time. John tells us that Jesus has always been a part of that song, and through this child who came to came to us in a manger, we learn to sing along.

Vicar Neal Cannon, The Nativity of Our Lord (Day); texts: John 1:1-14

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

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

The phrase, “In the beginning” is all over the Bible, but only two books in the Bible begin with this phrase. They are Genesis one, which I have just read to you, and the Gospel of John. Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the earth with God’s Word. I like to imagine God’s word being a song. And that Song creates light, and life. And I quote this because this is the image that John wants us to have for Jesus when we read our gospel lesson.

John wants us to know who this Jesus person is. He wants us to know his song.

In the Jewish tradition, the infinite Word of God is contained in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and the Torah is the centerpiece of the Jewish faith. Now, the Torah contains 613 laws and rules for living interwoven with the stories of faith and history of the Jewish people.

So for the Jewish people, the Torah is the centerpiece of faith, it’s the tune that they sing to. It’s the song that they sing. The Torah is the Word of God, and the Word of God brings light and life into the world as in the Genesis story.

And now John comes along, and he makes a new claim, or rather, a very old claim. He writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John’s claim, the Christian claim, is that Jesus is the Word of God, and the Word of God brings light and life into the world.

So according to John, in Jesus all the law, the prophets, and the history of Jewish people are contained within Jesus. Jesus becomes the centerpiece of faith, the tune to which we sing and orient our lives.

Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. This claim is incredibly important because it tells us who Jesus is and that helps us perceive God in a new way.

The traditional way we perceive God is through Scripture. When I was researching for this sermon I came across an article from a Jewish scholar on the incarnation of God. Now, incarnation comes from the Latin word, incarnatus, which essentially means in the flesh, in caro (flesh).

The scholar who wrote the article was making the case that for the Jewish people, God becomes incarnate when we study and learn Torah. The more we learn, the more knowledge we have, the more God’s Word becomes incarnate in our life. It helps us to see things in a new way that we haven’t necessarily seen before. As Christians, we make the same claim about Jesus in scripture. Jesus is the Word of God incarnate from the beginning.

But how can this be?  How could Jesus have been there all along?

Think about it this way, is there a song you’ve heard a hundred times and then all of a sudden you notice something new about that song you’ve never noticed before?  When I was a kid, I used to swear that the song had changed in some way. But over time, I realized that I was hearing it in a new way. Before it was background music, but now new part of the song emerged and it changed the way I heard the music.

I think John is saying that Jesus is like this. He says that Jesus is like the part of the song that nobody noticed before, and when Jesus comes into the world, at first it seems like a new thing. But what John is saying is that Jesus has always been there, and has always been a part of God’s song.

John goes on to tell us that this song takes on flesh.

Jesus is the Word of God incarnate, literally in the flesh. He writes, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” If the Word lives among us, then the Word of God is not just something we study or hear. The Word of God is a child that came to us in a manger that lives and acts in this world, a person that creates light and life. In other words, the Song is life.

Jesus is life.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at me now, but as a kid, I didn’t particularly like going to church. It was a chore to get me out the door. I whined, I pouted, I kicked at things, and generally I tested my parent’s patience at every turn.

To me church was a lot of words that blended together. We read the Word of God, we sang the Word of God, and every Sunday, we listened to the Word of God in one really long boooring sermon. Some days it was all I could do to keep my adolescent brain from exploding and running out the back doors to play basketball, go skiing, or sometimes just sleep in the car.

But there was one part about church that I used to always love and still do to this day. That part of church was communion, the Eucharist. It was always odd to me because almost without fail, after taking communion, I felt alive, I felt new.

So I’d get in line, and here the words, “body of Christ, given for you, blood of Christ, shed for you.” And after receiving the Eucharist, I’d feel, new, better, lighter than before.

Then I’d sit down and I’d tap my little sister on the shoulder and look away, she’d laugh. My brother would step on my foot, and we’d smile, and laugh together. All the while my parents did what they could to hush us up, but even they couldn’t help joining in. Our whole family seemed lighter afterwards as the worries of the morning washed away. And for whatever reason, I’d leave church as if I’d loved the whole experience all along.

It’s like I was hearing a totally new song.

Now, I have a lot of theories on why this is. The first theory that I adopted was because the Eucharist, is at the end of the service. And I knew that we were almost done. So close to freedom!

While there might be an element of truth to that the more I thought of it, the more I realized there were other reasons why I loved communion. I found, and still find, that the Eucharist is the tangible part of the service. It’s the part of the service that you could touch, and taste, and hold in your hand. It requires nothing of you but to receive.

Later, my theological training in seminary would teach me that this experience was the Word of God coming to me, and giving me life. But growing up, I just knew it as that feeling of being made new. Or as John would say, being born-again.

Throughout the Gospel of John, the idea that Jesus is the Word of God is weaved through the narrative. Later in John Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

I think what I encountered in the Eucharist growing up is this very principle that the Word of God gives us life. I was hearing the song through the bread and wine. As I grew older I learned to appreciate how the sermon, and music, and liturgy dwell in us and give us life in the same way that I received it in the Eucharist. But at the time, the Eucharist was the way that God came to me and made me new.

“Body of Christ, given for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you.”

I love this idea because that means that the Word of God is not just about words. Like we experience in the Eucharist, the Word of God is something tangible that we can hold on to. It’s a tune that’s carried in our arms as well as our hearts and minds.

On Christmas Eve, we are especially reminded of this, as Mary carries this Song of God, not only in the Magnificat, but also in her arms as she holds Jesus.

I like to imagine Mary holding the Song of God in her arms, caring for him, feeding him, and singing him a lullaby as he cries. I like to imagine Mary being in awe of her son’s song as he sang it with his life. I also imagine that Mary sang a song of lament as Jesus hung on the cross.

In the Eucharist, we participate in this song. We hold the body of Christ in our hands. We remember his life, death, and resurrection and in that we are connected to Word of God that gives us life, the beginning of all things. And we like Mary, become, intimately connected to the Song as we learn to sing along. As John says, we become God’s children. We are connected to the Song that was in the beginning all things.

And as we learn to sing God’s song, the Song becomes incarnate in us.

Have you ever been in a situation where a friend or family member is sharing a deep and personal truth? Maybe they’ve just revealed to you that they are dying or admitting they have an addiction. When we are able to sit there, and comfort them, and support them, we’re singing God’s song.

Sometimes we don’t have to say a thing. Sometimes a hug, or tear, or just your presence is enough to assure someone that God’s song is playing in the background.

It also doesn’t have to be a sad situation. Maybe someone is telling you for the first
time that they are getting married or they just got an A on their test or they just got a big
promotion. Sharing joy together is an experience of incarnation as well. It’s another way to sing.

That’s what Jesus is for us in the incarnation. He’s a song that comes to us as a child in a manger, as bread and wine, and gives us the Word of God without saying anything. Jesus gives us his presence. And through this experience of the bread and wine we are given a new light and life to see and experience the world.

So who is Jesus? He is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Jesus is the Word of God incarnate. Jesus is light and life. Jesus is the bread and wine. But most of all, Jesus is the song that that has been playing since the beginning of time. Let us sing along.

Thanks be to God.

The true plan of God, the revelation of which has begun at Christmas, is incredibly risky, and with our chaos and tumult and desire for other ways, we might miss it.  But it is the only way to true peace on earth.

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

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

There has been much conversation and concern among Christian clergy in the past weeks over how to welcome Christmas into a world which also carries within it the death of innocent children, not just in Connecticut but daily all over this planet, though the events of the past weeks have pushed the concern to the forefront.  This world seems as brutal as it always has been, and though we claim “peace on earth” tonight and for the next weeks, we find precious little peace in our world or in our hearts.

It is one of the deepest challenges to the Christmas proclamation, and not just this year.  If this celebration is merely a denial of the world’s reality, a chance for us to come inside and be mesmerized by beautiful things and sing wistfully of peace, while the war and pain rages on outside, if our Christmas joy is not capable of addressing the real world problems that were in our newspapers this morning and most certainly will be in them again tomorrow morning, we really ought to stop doing it.  How we face that challenge, that 2,000 years of time have come and gone since the birth of the One we call Prince of Peace, and still it seems to be the same as it always has been, that’s our concern.

There is a carol which powerfully addresses this concern, but not if we sing it from our worship book.  Or even from the former green book.  Only if we open the old, red book does it help us.  Because the last two editions of Lutheran worship books from our tradition have omitted a key stanza.

This carol is actually one Lutherans have struggled with somewhat, because it never mentions Jesus’ birth.  It was written by an American Unitarian, Edmund Sears, and though it is immensely popular in the culture, many older Lutheran books omitted it.  The carol is “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” and all it talks about is the angels’ song, not Jesus.  But not every hymn needs to speak every truth we believe, and there is something powerful going on in this carol which spoke to me a great deal in these past weeks.  That is, if you sing all five stanzas.

It’s powerful, because this is the angels’ song the carol keeps mentioning: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth.”  That’s what the angels sang.  Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth.  That’s what the coming of the Son of God is to bring.  There is little else we could hope for from God more needed, more desperately wanted, than that peace on earth.  And that, the carol sings about.

But listen to the missing words:
   Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long;
   Beneath the angel-strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong;
   And man, at war with man, hears not the love song which they bring . . .

For 2,000 years the world has suffered with sin and strife, in spite of the angels’ song of peace, that’s what that stanza sings.  And that is the struggle we have with Christmas.  No matter how much peace we find in here tonight, the real world rages on.  As if nothing has happened, or will happen.

Tonight we need more than ever to know the truth about what God is really giving us, a truth that is strong enough to carry us through all the bleak midwinters of this world, not just one night a year of the magic of a baby in a manger.

A point to start is the question that need implies:  What is it that you want from God at Christmas?

We often pin so many hopes and dreams on Christmas.  We hope that our families will all be together, that we all get along, that we find peace in our lives, peace in our hearts, rest for our spirits.

And we hope for more than just ourselves.  We hope that the pain we see in the world will lessen, that we will find real peace on this earth.  That God’s coming is making a difference.

There is reason for us to expect that.  We hear such promises of what we will receive that we can’t help believing them.  Listen to Isaiah tonight: endless peace will come, with justice and righteousness.  Listen to the angels tonight: peace on earth, good will to all.

But for us, we who will open newspapers tomorrow or watch the news again, we who go back to our own lives, it’s hard to maintain hope in these being fulfilled.  We face massacres here and abroad, and wars here and abroad, all on top of our own difficulties and struggles.  And we thought that Christmas meant God was doing something about that.  That’s what we sing and say, anyway.

But here’s the question: what if God is doing something different than we wanted or expected?  What if Christmas tells us that God’s answer to the evil and pain of this world is not what we thought it would be, but something else?  If that’s true, that’s something we ought to know.

We should pay attention, because it’s clear that what we think we want is not what we get.

The Messiah we get at Christmas isn’t the Messiah we thought we wanted.

We often talk about how Jesus was not the Messiah everyone wanted or expected in his day.  Some expected an earthly king.  Others a revolutionary.  Others a priest-like person who didn’t associate with the kinds of people Jesus did.  In the end, Jesus was rejected by the leaders of his people as not being the Anointed of God.  He wasn’t what they wanted.

The truth is, we’re in the same boat.  We love the Christmas story.   We’re amazed that the people of Jesus’ day couldn’t see he was truly God’s Son, the Messiah.

But we don’t love the implications of what Jesus’ birth as a human child means for how the world works.   What we get in the baby in the manger isn’t what we want for our everyday lives, or for the world.  We think we’d rather have a God who intervened a little more often.  It turns out, we still think that God’s Messiah ought to be and act like the people of Jesus’ day thought.  We’re in full agreement with them.

The real truth about Christmas is this: it is a foolish, risky plan of God.  That’s what is so hard for us, why we can’t see the hope in what God did in that manger 2,000 years ago.  When we think about the problems of the world that are so huge, and ask, “Why doesn’t God do something about that?” we are saying that we don’t like what God did at Christmas.

Listen:  when Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem, the amazing thing was not the star.  Not the angels.  Not the shepherds.  Not the beautiful music, if there was any.  No, the amazing, risky, foolish thing is that God risked the salvation of the entire world on becoming one of us in this child, who would grow not to take over the world and fix it by force, but grow to lead the world back into obedience to God and love of God and neighbor.

This world is incredibly dangerous for children, we know that all too well.  So from the start, God’s plan was a gamble.  But even when Jesus grew up, the plan was a tremendous risk, this plan to lead us back to God instead of forcing us.

Do you see it?  God, the creator of the universe, decided not to force us to be good, but to lead us to be good.  The stakes are high: God is hoping that it will work, but it’s entirely possible that we’ll all keep being evil, and the world never gets better.

And for 2,000 years that has seemed to have happened.  But as the hymnwriter said, the problem is not that the angels’ song is wrong, or that the promise is false.

It is that “man, at war with man” (not the language we use for humanity anymore, and probably the reason the stanza was omitted from our books, since there’s no way to poetically re-write it using five syllables and still have such a powerful and succinct summary of the truth), the problem is that we are at war with ourselves, with each other, with our own kind so much, that we cannot hear the song of peace and love God is giving us.  The noise of our chaos, our fighting, our self-centeredness overwhelms the song of the angels.  Our need for God to be what we want God to be closes our ears to hearing what God is actually doing.

But here is also the truth: for 2,000 years, God’s plan has been working, as well, slowly but surely.

Peace has spread, as promised, but not by force.  Through love of one person for another, through the Spirit that the risen Messiah gives us.  Exactly as God hoped would happen when he came in person to live with us, teach us, love us, lead us.

And frankly, from a human view, it is inefficient, it’s costly, it’s risky, and it’s just plain crazy.  It would have been cleaner and neater for God to just take over the world and bring peace by force.  And some days, in the real world, we wish God would do that.  Only that wouldn’t bring about the peace God truly hopes for and wants.

God actually wants people to willingly follow, willingly obey, willingly love.  And so God’s Son was born to us.  To teach us, to show us God’s love, and a way to live.  To die and rise to break sin and death’s power over us.

Our Christmas gift from God is not that this is a beautiful story.  It is that it is life for us.  The true beauty of this Christmas Eve is not in the sweet story or sweet music.  It is that God has come to be in our hearts, to live with us and change us.  To bring peace to our lives and our world through you and through me.

And that is a reality that lasts far beyond this night.  That is a gift of love and peace, of transformation, that will carry us through the rest of our lives, until we can sing with the angels ourselves.  A gift that has the strength to face the suffering and evil of this world and transform it into the peace on earth God has always intended.

So, did you get what you wanted from God this Christmas?

Maybe not, if you wanted God to use power to bring peace to your life and to the world.  But you got what you needed: God’s power in you, God’s love in your life, God’s will to guide you.  And that is what is most important.

Listen again to the missing stanza, this time with the last line included:
   Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long;
   Beneath the angel-strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong;
   And man, at war with man, hears not the love song which they bring:
   O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing.

What is Mr. Sears’ answer for us tonight?  Hush the noise, all you in strife, and hear the angels sing.  Hush the noise of our complaining that God doesn’t come and listen to the joy that God is already here.  Hush the noise of our struggling with our own selves and with others, the noise of our self-centeredness, the noise of our shouting at each other, the noise of our hatred, the noise of our wars, the noise of our fears, hush all that noise, and listen to the peace that God is giving us.

We didn’t get what we thought we wanted.  But we got what we needed.  So let’s hush our noise, and hear the angels sing.  They have something very important to say.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen