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The sermon for December 24 was on Matthew 1:18-25.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ. Amen.
We have an especially beautiful Christmas tree at the parsonage. My wife has
put some number of thousand lights on it and the combination of all those lights
and the many bright and brilliant ornaments produces a light like no other.
There is no lamp, no fire, no glow that I know of that can compare. It isn't
like sunlight or moonshine. It is a light all its own. It is a light that can
mean only Christmas. Nothing evokes the "feeling" of Christmas for me
like the uniquely combined light of our tree. For you it may be a combination of
smells. The mingled scents of pine and gingerbread and peppermint. You might
find that, for you, Christmas has a sound all its own. Carols or choirs or the
sound of Charlie Brown's friends singing around that pitiful little tree.
The Good News proclaimed by the angles tonight is also a unique coming together
of many wonderful and compelling blessings. To isolate some of those blessings
and look at them individually is bit like holding a prism up to white light. It
breaks the light into several single colored beams. It's a backwards way to
approach Christmas, I admit, but we might find it helpful.
Beauty is one of the main colors of Christmas, one of its primary wavelengths,
if you will. It's like the green light right in the middle of the rainbow.
Christmas, at least the way we imagine it and desire it to be, is a season full
of elegance and pageantry, a time for music and tenderness. We decorate our
homes for Christmas to an extent that would be unthinkable for any other season.
We wrap our presents in bows and bright paper. We even wrap ourselves in fancy
clothes. We put lights on our houses and candles in our windows. We play
background music and light fires in our fireplaces. Christmas calls for beauty
and we each try to answer that call.
But a Christmas that is merely pretty is incomplete and unsatisfying. If all we
want to do is make the world a prettier place to look at we'd be better off
painting our houses than decking them with lights. We'd be better served by
joining a gym than buying red sweaters or socks with Christmas trees on them.
Christmas calls for beauty but it isn't just about the beauty. There is a reason
that we feel compelled to deck the hall and don the apparel. There's something
beautiful about Christmas that spills out into our living rooms and runs along
our eaves troughs.
Truth is another of the primary colors in the Christmas pallet. People who
couldn't be bothered with either poetry or literature during any other season
will pay close attention to the works of Charles Dickens, Clement Moore or even
the musical literature of Tchaikovsky and Bach. Sincerity and tradition also
come to the fore as Christmas approaches. We want things to be right and honest
and we want ourselves to be the same way. We've made Christmas a holiday for
children, at least in part, because we remember childhood as a time of honesty
and sincerity and truth. The holidays don't always bring out the best in us, but
they do always seem to bring out the truth.
A Christmas that was entirely and exclusively about honesty and truth would be
more scary than Halloween. We want the truth but not all truth is pretty. When
beauty and truth do come together though it is a blessing indeed and we have a
special name for the combination of truth and beauty, we call it grace. The way
a talented dancer makes the right step at the right time is graceful. There is
grace in the way a skilled musician hits the right note in the right way. Beauty
is not enough. Truth is not enough. Beauty and Truth together are more than the
sum of their parts. Together they begin to make us think of Christmas. But there
are more colors.
Christmas is also about what Shakespeare would call "the milk of human
kindness". We feel almost inexplicably compelled toward charity and
gift-giving as Christmas approaches. We send cards to people we haven't spoken
to in years. We buy gifts for people we barely know and not all of it is about
keeping up appearances. As the celebration of Christ's birth approaches we are
moved to give and share and have mercy. Our thoughts tend toward the less
fortunate and we can even, however briefly, toy with the idea of reconciling
with estranged loved ones.
I would pay to live through even one day where everyone was genuinely concerned
about everyone else and the milk of human kindness filled us all. That one day
would be better than all the other days we've lived so far but it still wouldn't
be Christmas. It would be a great day to be sure but it wouldn't be Christmas
Day. But, if we added truth and beauty to such a day, we'd be getting somewhere.
Truth, beauty and brotherly love point each of us in the same direction. The
combination of grace and fraternity urges us toward transcendence.
Christmas must be divine. It must include God, must be about God and we know it.
We don't like X-mas and we'd all rather say "Merry Christmas" than
"happy holidays". Peace on earth, yes. Good will to men, yes but good
will to men, from whom? The answer, of course, is God. Christmas is about God
expressing His good will to men. It is about God reconciling the world to
Himself. Christmas is about God coming to men and about men coming to God. Yet
Christmas can't be about just any God. Christmas must be about Christ.
Christmas means Christ's Mass, the mass of Christ. The only God who fits in the
manger is Jesus. Tonight we celebrate His birth. Jesus is the very Son of God.
He is God. He is also truly human. We call the combination of Man and God an
incarnation, a making flesh, an embodiment. God becomes a man, a baby to be
precise, so that He can bear the punishment of our sins in our place. He comes
to forgive us for all the times we've made the world ugly, for all the times
we've lied, for all the times we've been selfish and for all the times we've
trusted in something or someone more than we've trusted in God. Jesus comes to
wash away our sins forever.
If we combine truth and beauty we get grace. If we combine God and man we get
the incarnation. If we combine grace and the incarnation we get one thing and
one thing only. We get Christmas. Truth and beauty and God and man combine to
evoke Christmas as uniquely and even more perfectly than the many colored lights
on my Christmas tree. Incarnate grace is the heart and soul of Christmas. It is
the coming together of all the separate beauties in the world. It is the
convergence of all that is good and noble and it is redeeming in a way that
nothing else could be.
I said that we were going to back into Christmas in a way, to consider some of
the strongest colors of Christmas in isolation. We don't have to do this in
reverse. Christ has come to forgive our sins and with Him He brings beauty and
truth and humanity and divinity and a host of other blessings. He gives us these
blessings freely, even though we haven't deserved them. He gives them to us
through His Holy and Inspired Word. He gives them to us in Holy Baptism and in
the Lord's Supper. He gives them in ways we would never suspect and at times
that we would never have imagined.
We are not likely to find Christ by single-mindedly pursuing beauty, truth,
fellowship with God, brotherhood with men or any combination of the above. But
beauty, truth, fellowship with God and brotherhood with men are among the
Christmas gifts God brings us when He comes to us, in flesh and blood and
merciful humility in His Word and in His Sacraments. May it be so for you
tonight and for the rest of your lives. Amen.
The Peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds
in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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