The sermon for December 25 was based on John 1:1-14.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Currier & Ives do to Christmas what super models do to housewives and professional athletes do to ordinary men. They paint an ideal that is almost universally appealing while being equally unattainable. We all have in our heads a picture of the way Christmas should be. And it is almost always quite a bot different from the way Christmas really is. Stop and consider for a moment how different your personal ideal is from the reality you are experiencing. Are there people absent from your celebration this year that you feel should be present? Maybe someone close to you has passed away, maybe someone close to you has moved away, maybe someone close to you is no longer close to you even though they are in the same room with you. We all feel the tension created by the comparison of how we feel things ought to be with the way they really are.

In some ways the Bible is like a Currier & Ives print. It too paints beautiful pictures that we can never realize, at least not in this life. Moses describes an Eden non of us will ever be able to visit. St. Paul describes a household none of us will ever live in. In our Gospel for this morning St. John describes a relationship that we can scarcely fathom let alone recognize appreciate or experience for ourselves. There is a oneness and intimacy between Jesus and His Father and the Holy Spirit that is so pure and so perfect that they are three persons and yet one God. Who among us doesn't long for greater intimacy and closeness with people we love.

The concept of "the way things out to be" can be a terrible task master. It can keep us from enjoying the life we have and it can even drive us to despair. Here's an important lesson for all of us and one that St. John tries to teach is in our Gospel. Most of the time, our ideas of how things "ought" to be are wrong. They are nothing more than our own faulty and fallen ideas about how things "should" be. Pride makes each of us think that we know best how the world should be run and what our lives should be like. The truth is very different. As Joseph was led off to Egypt having been sold into slavery by his brothers he would have been very tempted to cry out in his soul that this was not the way things should be, that his life was not going the way it ought to go and yet it was going the way God intended it to go. God would have preferred there to be no sin in the world at all and yet, sin, having arrived anyway, He so governs the lives of his people that His divine and benevolent will is accomplished anyway.

As I wrote the outline for this sermon Alex sat on my lap at my desk and played with 3 golf balls that he'd found somewhere. In a house packed to overflowing with toys and books and movies and music he chose to play with golf balls. Families all over the world today will witness their children set aside the toys they've been given so that they can play games with the boxes they came in and the paper and ribbons they with which they were wrapped. Some parents hungry for gratitude or loath to have purchased the toys to begin with might feel that this is not the way things should be and the next thing they know their Christmas joy is being drained away by the tyranny of "should" and "ought".

If you fixate on how things ought to be or how they should be you are going to be unhappy. First of all you can only be sure of how things "ought" to be when you have a clear word of God on the matter and that word written down in Holy Scripture. Anything else is going to be your own faulty opinion about what would be best. And even when you have that clear word of Scripture you also have the whole theme of the Bible itself which is that in this world things are almost never the way they should be. People should be sinless and yet the clear word of God is that all of us fall short. People should not die yet the Bible clearly teaches that except for Enoch and those who will be alive at Christ's return, we're all going to die sooner or later. Even God admits that the world is not the way it should be. This is no excuse however, for missing out what is beautiful and strengthening and noble and joyous in life.

God shouldn't be separated from us. We should be walking together in the Garden still. But we are cut off from Him. So what does He do? He comes to us and not in some theoretically perfect future where we've overcome our sinfulness and are once again worthy of His fellowship. He comes to us in the dark night of our sinfulness knowing full well that we will not be able to recognize Him or appreciate Him or love Him the way He deserves. Neither does He come with anger or vengeance or wrath. He comes wrapped in swaddling cloths and needing His diaper changed. He comes right here, right now. You are at this very moment hearing His own voice speaking to you of His love and compassion. He is telling you that the world is not the way it should be and that even more deviant from the ideal than world is the way you live your own life. You are less perfect even the crazy and fallen world around you. He is telling you that He has come to help you and that all you can really do is trust Him to build a worthy life for you out of the shattered wreckage of your daily existence. You are hearing God's own voice and the question is, what are you going to do about it?

One option is to pretend that you can't hear Him. Pretend that you are not fallen, that it is all someone else's fault and your are as pure as the driven snow. This rout leads to isolation and despair and even madness. It prevents you giving and receiving the love that there is in your life and it prevents you from fellowship with God. If you adopt that kind of self-righteousness you wind up denying that God is even here. The Pastor is only spouting his own opinions not the real Word of God. Jesus is only symbolically present in the bread and wine, not really there to forgive sins. Baptism is just a ritual, not a pouring out of the Holy Ghost to the end that we believe in God again. The other option is to forget about the way things should be, forget that we should be walking with God in paradise and take hold of Him as He comes to us in the Means of Grace. Eat His Body, Drink His Blood, Bath in the waters of Baptism, head His voice in the Bible and from the pulpit. Forget that we should be somewhere else and in other circumstances and be glad that we're together and that He's come to save us.

Once God takes hold of us and we begin to rejoice in His company we are able to share that grace with others. Your loved ones shouldn't treat you the way they do and you shouldn't treat them the way you do but... there is more to life than the idea of how it should be. There is more to the husband or wife or child or parent or brother or sister or friend who annoys you than what they do to annoy you, there are a great many other things and some of them are simply wonderful. It's Christmas Day, toss out your ideals and kneel down at the manger. Notice the straw and the cattle and the poverty and the smell and the discomfort and the tensions between Mary and Joseph and the strangers who keep intruding on their pitiful efforts to get some rest. Then turn your attention to the Baby, the one who exchanged the glory of heaven for all of this just to be with us. It's Christmas Day, all that matters today is that the one who's universe Adam and Eve destroyed with their insistence that they knew better than God how things should be has come to recreate His world and reconnect with His people and reconnect His people with one another. It's Christmas Day, nothing is the way it should be and yet, somehow it seems as if things might actually turn out better than we ever imagined. It's Christmas Day. For the true believer, it's always Christmas Day. Amen. 

The Peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Last Updated: 5/27/2009