Community Church Sermons
Christmas 1, Year B - December 26, 1999
"Christ Was Born For This"
Luke 2:22-40
Dr. Stephen K. Nash, Associate Pastor
I once heard about a woman who had waited until the last minute to send Christmas cards. She rushed into a store and bought a package of 50 cards without really looking at them. Still in a big hurry she addressed 49 of the 50 cards and signed them without reading the message inside. On Christmas day, when things had quieted down somewhat and she chanced to run across the leftover card and finally read the message she had sent to 49 of her 50 friends. Much to her dismay, it read: "This card is just to say—a little gift is on the way." I hope you all had a blessed Christmas Day.
A few years back, a church was asked to set up a "seasonal display" in a shopping center. A committee went to work and built a display that featured a video screen with the words over the screen taken from a familiar Christmas hymn "Christ was born for this." While the song played continuously, slides of scenes from current events flashed up on the screen. Scenes of war, poverty, riots, little children, families decorating Christmas trees. The message: Christ was born for this, for us, for now.
After two days the management of the mall called the church and demanded that they remove the display because, "Merchants feel that it is depressing and it will be bad for business because people don’t want to think about stuff like that at Christmas."
And you can see the merchants’ point. We have come here to celebrate Christmas, to rejoice at the birth of a baby. Babies and joy go together. You have to wait for the arrival of a baby. It takes months of expectation, preparation, anticipation. And when the baby at last arrives, there is great joy. Grandparents arrive, older brothers and sisters are excited and proud. First pictures are passed around for admiration. What is more joyful than the arrival of a new baby.
And yet, what is more frightening than the birth of a baby? It is frightening, isn’t it? Sure, it’s joyful for the young parents at first. But then there are bills to pay, clothes to buy, education to finance. Children, our joy, are also the most expensive gifts we’ll ever receive!
You hold this little baby in your arms, cherishing it, loving it. Yet there will be other days when you will walk the floor into the night, fitfully waiting for that now grown baby to get back home and be safe. You will, as one woman told me, "wear out your knees in prayer" for her when that little one becomes sixteen and begins to drive the car. There will be disappointments, fierce disagreements, words exchanged, paths taken and not. And so we held that new baby in our arms, cherished and enjoyed it, for we knew that there would be other days not so joyful.
Most new parents I know are extremely proud and joyful about their new baby. Yet beneath their proud parental flood of great joy, there runs another current—fearful anticipation for what the future may hold. Babies bring joy today but babies also carry us forward, beyond today, into the future. Today there is joy. What of tomorrow?
But why, on this bright day of all days, this second day of the great celebration of the feast of Christmas, why mention fear? We’ve waited for this day, this day to celebrate the Nativity, this day when Isaiah sings (Isaiah 61:10) "I will rejoice in the Lord." The liturgical color of white on our altar proclaims this Sunday of Christmas as a season of extravagant, unrestrained joy and celebration. As Paul says in today’s epistle lesson, today is the "fullness of time" (Gal. 4:4).
Come to the temple with me for our joyous celebration of the Nativity. There won’t be any moralizing or messages full of shoulds and oughts and musts. Just being joyful in the house of the Lord. On our way into the temple, we meet two old people who have been waiting a long gime for time’s fullness, Simeon and Anna.
Like many older people, Simeon and Anna appear to love babies. Simeon reaches out, takes the little babe in his arms, and praises God for this gift, this newness, this fresh life. Futhermore, the old man says that he is at last ready to die because he has seen God’s salvation. Mary and Joseph were amazed, the text says, at what old Simeon was saying about their baby. Simeon thn gives the new parents his blessing.
I know someone who’s aunt was dying of cancer. She lingered near death for many weeks but she held on, telling visitors, "I’m waiting for the birth of my first grandchild."
The day after that child was born, Will’s aunt’s youngest daughter took the little baby to the hospital, laid him in his grandmothers arms, and she rejoiced. The whole family rejoiced, because on the day of the baby’s birth, the grandma took a turn for the better. They eve thought she might fully recover. Yet that very night, she died. A dying woman had held and celebrated new life, then she was ready to die. That’s the way that Simeon said it was for him as he blessed this new baby and his parents.
But Simeon offered a very strange blessing. "This child will cause the falling and rising of many," he predicted. "He shall be opposed—a sword shall also pierce your heart."
Amid all of the joy about this little baby, what strange words! Opposition, falling and rising, a sword. Is this appropriate baby talk, appropriate Christmas talk?
We have come here to church today to celebrate Christmas, to sing with joy the Christmas songs we love to sing. We have been given a new baby, fresh, new, full of joyful potential. Then we meet old Simeon who tells us that this birth shall involve as much pain as joy.
This is not the message the world, or we, want to hear. The world wants to celebrate, to dance to Christmas jingles, unlimitedly to spend in the malls, unlimitedly to envision itself as happy, peaceful, generous.
Now, on December 26, after all the shopping mall jingles are silent, after we’ve had the parties, the buying and the giving, the church gathers and celebrate joy, real joy. Christmas joy is not about an annual fantasy trip into never-never land. It is about a God who loves us so much that he becomes one of us, born among us, looks like us, feels like us, lives like us, is us, dies like us. A God who comes to us, must be a God willing to get his hands dirty in the human condition.
A number of years ago, a pastor named Henry Carter tells how he was feverishly working on his Christmas sermon, the hardest time in any minister’s year to find something fresh to say. The church was attached to a children’s home which it operated—a home for children who were either orphaned, abused, or whose parents were unable to care for them. Suddenly one of the house-moms appeared at his study door to announce that there was a crisis. Christmas Eve was a difficult day for many of the children. Three quarters of them went to visit family at least overnight, and the ones who stay react to the empty beds and the changed routines.
Carter says, I followed her up the stairs, chafing inwardly at the repeated interuptions. This time it was Tommy. He had crawled under a bed and refused to come out. The woman pointed to one of the six cots in the small dormitory. Not a hair or toe showed beneath it, so I addressed myself to action figures on the bedspread. I talked about the brightly lighted tree in the church narthex next door and the packages underneath it and all the other good things waiting for him out beyond that bed.
No answer.
Still fretting at the time this was costing, I dropped to my hands and knees and lifted the spread. Two enormous blue eyes met mine. Tommy was eight, but looked like a five-year old. It would have been no effort at all simply to pull him out. But it wasn’t pulling that Tommy needed. It was trust and a sense of deciding things on his own initiative. So, crouched there on all fours, I launched into the menu of the special Christmas Eve supper to be offered after the service. I told him about the stocking with his name on it.
Silence. There was no indication that he either heard or cared about Christmas.
And at last, because I could think of no other way to make contact, I got down on my stomach and wriggled in beside him, bedsprings snagging my suit jacket. For what seemed like a long time I lay there with my cheeks pressed against the floor. At first I talked about the big wreath above the altar and the candles in the windows. I reminded him of the carol he and the other children were going to sing. Then I ran out of things to say and simply waited there beside him. And as I waited, a small, chilled hand crept into mine.
"You know, Tommy," I said after a bit, ‘it’s kind of close quarters under here. Let’s you and me go out where we can stand up." And so we did, but slowly, in no hurry. All the pressure had gone from my day, because, you see, I had my Christmas sermon. Flatted there on the floor I realized I had been given a new experiential glimpse of the mystery of this season.
Hadn’t God called to us too, as I’d called Tommy, from far above us? With stars and mountains, the whole majestic creation, hadn’t God pleaded with us to love him and enjoy the universe he created?
And when we wouldn’t listen, God had drawn closer. Through prophets and sages and holy persons, God spoke with us face to face.
But it wasn’t until that first Christmas, until God stooped to earth itself, until He came to dwell with us in our loneliness and alienation and pain, that we, like Tommy, dared to stretch out our hands to take hold of love.
The joy of the season is the joy of knowing that we are not alone. God is with us. But a God who comes to us, who gets dirty with us, who shares our human condition, is also a God who comes to tell us the truth about our condition, because it is the truth that sets us free. And a God who comes to tell the truth will be resisted, will cause the fall and the rising of many, a God whose words will be as much a sword in our hearts as a comfort.
Old Simeon had lived long enough to know that if God really wants to bless us, to save us, somehow this God must somehow confront the worst about us, the things we do to one another, the terrible things we do to ourselves. That confrontation would not be cheap. This cuddly baby in Jesus arms would grow up and would speak some radical truth to us, and would die for it. So a cross stands behind the manger this morning and Christmas also has something to do with Good Friday. This is our joy, but it is no simple joy. It is joy considerably more complex than most of what passes for Christmas joy these days.
Simeon’s words rearrange our notions of "blessings." This babe in the old man’s arms may be our salvation. Yet all this talk of swords and sadness, of people rising and falling, implies that our salvation is not a simplistic thing as implied in the evangelical catch-phrase "have you been saved," a phrase we never really come across in the Bible. And it implies that salvation will not come cheap. If we are to be saved, if God is going to do something about us, then God will have to do something about our alienation, our confusion, our cruelty, our narcissism, our fear. So, if Christmas is really about joy, it must be joy which somehow does business with our pain. It must be joy which comes in the midst of realism about what ails us, joy which does not avoid confrontation with the tough facts of life.
The gospel message today: Rejoice! True joy bursts upon us because Christ was born for this!
Let us pray:
Oh God who stoops to us and stays with us and struggles with us and who end the end saves us, may we know joy amid all our risings and fallings, even amid the pain and sadness, amid the hard work of reformation and rebuidling, all the days of our lives, until your kingdom comes, and your will is done on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.