Sermon to Christmas

Have We Received God’s Communication?

Christmas is a most wonderful time of the year, so says one of the popular
songs about Christmas. And it truly is. With the lights and Christmas
trees, with the songs- so familiar and sweet to the ears, with the gift
giving and receiving, with the family gatherings and festive parties,
Christmas is a most wonderful time of the year.

Except, of course, that is not what Christmas is about. Nor it is about
angels and shepherds and wise men. Nor is it about inns with „no
vacancy“ signs , babies, mangers, and stables with all sorts of
animals. Nor is it about Caesar, Mary, Joseph and Herod.

Christmas is God’s communication with us, God wanting to speak clearly
to us, wanting to get across to us who he is and what he is about–for
us. Christmas is not an e-mail we can erase, not a letter we read over
and over, not a blimp in the sky telling us good news. It is God’s direct
communication to us. It is God with us, Immanuel, if you like, but perhaps
even that is too mystical. It is God in this latter day, telling us in
the person of the Baby born in Bethlehem who he is and what he thinks
of us and how he wants us to think of him.

It is the most direct form of communication there is. God himself coming
to us, to our world, and revealing his glory–showing us exactly who
he is–our God full of grace and truth.

Communicating with another person is tough. We misunderstand words,
intonations, moods, and reaction to our words from others. Failure to
communicate is a problem for all of us. Will God make it through to me?
To you?

I am a hard person to communicate with. I don’t listen too well at times.
I throw most of my mail away, unless it has a real 37 cent stamp on it.
I finish my weekly news magazine in less than an hour. I delete most
of my e-mail without reading it, because most of it is spam anyway. I
read hardly any of the daily newspaper. My wife frequently asks if I
read this or that article in the paper, and I usually have to answer: „no.“ Television
is my opiate, but I know they are mostly stories without anything more
than entertainment value at best. I really don’t know how God is going
to communicate with this jaded, over stimulated person that I am.

How have you, have I received God’s communication this Christmas? Have
you and I been lured by bright greens and reds, by chocolate and butter
cookies, by shiny paper and high tech gifts into thinking that is what
Christmas is?

Has God done an effective job of communicating with us?

God has split the heavens and come down! Like it or not, our God is
Jesus for all practical purposes, without giving any less praise to the
Father and the Holy Spirit. It is startling to hear that Jesus made me;
I am his creation. It takes the breathe away to know that without him,
you and I don’t have life, but are simply tired pine trees, pretty for
the moment, but then cast into the fire. It is even more astonishing
that we can see anything, and I mean anything, without him shining on
us and our world.

Our darkness is thick, and deep, and often impenetrable. It is so bad
that we think darkness is light and light darkness. I often think about
when we come home at night to a dark house. Now we know the placing of
the furniture, and how to make it to the bathroom and bedroom without
injuring ourselves. But what do we do when we first enter the house?
We turn on the light because we are afraid that something, someone might
be hiding in the dark and dark makes us afraid. In our lives we hide
in darkness, rarely if ever, revealing who we really are except to a
psychologist or psychiatrist. Darkness makes us afraid, suspicious of
other people, and not wanting any light on the subject of what I am,
what I have done. Can you understand, (I don’t) why any of us would want
any light shown on our lives?

We, like so much of the rest of the world, don’t recognize him in our
lives. We don’t give him credit for our life and think little about salvation.
We are to see Jesus in others and we see people in our way, obstacles
to our advancement in life, unwilling to submit to our ways and our superior
knowledge. And God’s communication becomes like an old newspaper used
to wrap some delicate object, but which has no value on it own.

This Jesus came to provide purification for our sins. The dirt, the
evil, the darkness of sins needs cleaning up. Most of the time we think
we are clean because we have been so good. Just think how good you were
this Christmas? Look at all you gave and did for others!

What sins do we have for which we need purification? Only occasionally
do we discover that within ourselves there is a ruthless, stubborn, senseless,
faithless nature that believe I am right and others are always wrong.
And then the incident must be obliterated, filed by some other name in
our memory, hidden in those dark recesses of the mind where evil festers
until the stench and putrefaction overwhelms all else and it is comes
boiling out of us in ways that we say: „that can’t be me.“ What
need do we have to have „God“ dwelling among us?

In a world gone mad, in so many ways, we need God here with us. Now
among the evil, especially now, when it looks like evil could take me
over. When life is hard because of my perverseness or that of another,
when evil in the form of tragedy, accident, or simply the seemingly unfair
chances that are life, brings me to disaster of health, wealth, future,
or relationships, then God is there to tell me: „I am here with
you. I am not going to let anything overwhelm you, destroy you, obliterate
you or give you a sense of worthlessness, shame, or total aloneness.“

Then we can be children again. We can become children of God as his
love and purity, his presence pour into us through the Gospel and Blessed
Sacraments. Then we can wake up every day as my little grandchildren
do, alive, invigorated, ready for the day; trusting that the light of
the world will not hurt us, believing that he is living in us, trusting
his making us into his cleansed, refreshed children.

God has communicated with us. He became real–real bone, real muscle,
real brain, real human. We see this „letter from God“ who is
Jesus. And what do you see?

Remember that nursery rhyme? „Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have
you been?“ „I’ve been London to look at the queen.“ „Pussy
cat, pussy cat, what did you there?“ „I scared a little mouse,
under her chair.“

To see the queen, but to see only a mouse. To have Jesus come to us,
but to see only lights on trees. To have the light of the world shine
on you, but to see only the darkness of our lives and world. To have
Jesus among us, but to be fearful of life. To have the One and Only who
came from the Father, full of grace and truth, but to believe I have
to make God love me. To be purified by the One who sits a the right hand
of his Majesty in heaven, but to trust in something else far inferior
for life, love and the future.

God has communicated with you. Do you get the Message? Amen.

Walter W. Harms, retired pastor
waltpast@ AOL.com