Trinity Parish

Published Sermons

« Anne Jensen - Dec 17, 2006 | Main | Fred Heard - Christmas Day 06 » | Anne Jensen - Dec 24, 2006  »

December 24, 2006

Anne Jensen - Dec 24, 2006

Christmas Eve 2006

Download as a PDF

We are here, at last, gathered to worship God and to celebrate the Incarnation….God becoming human. I invite you to leave your anxieties at the door and to enter in the story of our salvation…how God chose to be with us and for us. I invite you to enter the mystery of the young woman Mary bearing a son….the one we call Immanuel, God with us. We call him Jesus, which means savior, and we call him the Christ, the messiah, the anointed one of God. I invite you to let the joy of this good news soak into you and soften your hearts, and I invite you to sing with joy, no matter whether you think you can sing or not! It doesn’t matter to God what you sound like, but it does matter to God that you open your heart to the joy God has in store for us.

I found a prayer that was written at Christmas almost 40 years ago and I want to share it with you:
Give us, O God, the vision which can see Your love in the world in spite of human failure.

Give us the faith to trust Your goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness.

Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts.

And show us what each one of us can do to set forward the coming of the day of universal peace. -- Frank Borman, Apollo 8 space mission, 1968

This prayer was written 38 years ago…from a new perspective, outer space. It was written by Frank Borman when he was on the Apollo space mission, which spanned the Christmas season that year. It was the first Christmas after Doug and I were married. It was the year of the Hong Kong flu, which was rampant. The war in Viet Nam plagued us. Doug had just finished Navy Officer Candidates School, and we were on our way to Athens, Georgia. We spent Christmas with old family friends in Pennsylvania. There was a lot of snow on the ground and it was bitterly cold. Doug had to wear his full dress uniform to church because is was the warmest clothing he had. I remember coming home from the midnight service, where we had prayed for the astronauts, and listening to the latest report. The heavens, cold and clear, seemed so vast and so empty. I prayed those men would be able to find their way home. It was an anxious time-- both in space and on the earth. Being in space offered the perspective of how much greater creation is than just our planet and our concerns, and yet I believe Borman’s prayer came out of love for this blue planet and trust that God could change us and the world. The prayer was for a vision in which we can see God’s love in the world, despite our human failure.

There’s a great story about a preacher who bumped into one of his parishioners. She was coming out of the store with her hands full of packages. It was a good solid bump and she dropped all her packages. As the minister hastened to help her, he heard her say, “I hate Christmas. It turns everything upside down.” Well, you know what she meant: the daily routine is disrupted, the budget is stretched too thin, there are more people in the house than she’s used to….all the processes she has in place to provide stability and security are out the window. But she’s got it right! The birth of Christ changed the world….turned everything upside down. Remember the words of Mary and the reversal of the “the way things are.” “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly./ He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” The Incarnation means change. It means God coming into our time and into our space and into our lives and into our comfort zone and shaking things up and making them be recreated in a new way and challenging us to confront change and to be active in doing something, working with God in the world around us.

Jim Mueller tells of one of his most memorable Christmases. He writes, “I was sitting in my church on Christmas Eve and in walks a man, a person I didn’t know well, but who later became a close friend. He sat down next to me. Throughout the service I felt a little weird. I sang out during the songs I loved – Joy to the World, Silent Night, O Little Town of Bethlehem. I felt weird because I could feel him watching me, what I did, how I did it. He was watching me “do” church. I realized something that night. He was relearning Christmas. He was trying to figure out what Christmas means when you have faith in Jesus Christ. The baby in the manger is more than a holiday decoration. Jesus was more real for him. Jesus became more real for me. That night I felt the presence of God come over that place. That night was the first time I ever heard my friend sing. Not all of the songs, not all of the words but a few that he knew, and very quietly. And he was singing about God coming into our world to change it forever. He was worshipping his savior.” Maybe some of you are relearning Christmas tonight. It is never too late to become like a child and take in this mystery of God’s love for each one of us.

In the months that followed Jim and his friend found themselves in deeper and deeper conversations, lives shared, tears shed. Jim saw this man change and grow.

Change has been a theme here at Trinity for the last eighteen months. We have not been alone, left to our own devices. Not at all. We have learned to “do” church in a new way. We have learned a new song. We have experienced God’s love and grace time and again. God-with-us, our Emmanuel is changing us, and we are singing a new song of joy, and a song of expectation. One of the most beautiful changes I’ve seen is how people who used to mistrust each other have come to a new appreciation and understanding. That, my friends, is reconciliation. Christ is in the world reconciling us to God and to each other. When we let Jesus into our hearts, and by that I mean the love of God made known to us by Jesus, his birth, his teaching and ministry, and his death, we begin to change. And when we change, or as St. Paul says, when we put on Christ, we are a new people. We are a people filled with hope, filled with energy, and fueled by a new kind of power. We are a people who have a vision of a restored world characterized by shalom, God’s peace as envisioned in creation.

The very heart of tonight’s gospel is the good news of the breaking in of a new time: “Do not be afraid; for see--I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” This day heaven and earth are brought together, joined by the presence of an infant who is both very vulnerable…of humble stock and born in a stable, and who fulfills that wonderful prophecy: “And he shall be called wonderful counselor, almighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”

This is good news for you…and for all of us. Since God is breaking the news to the people on the lowest rung of society, the shepherds, we know that things are being tipped upside down. The shepherds were blessed with the radiance of heaven and a chorus of “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to t hose on whom his favor rests.” The symbolism is that his favor rests on all who hear and believe. Do you think the shepherds danced to this music, filled with joy and buoyed by the good news? I think they may just have waltzed and skipped and hopped all the way back to their flocks.

We still long for the peace that the angels proclaimed. Sometimes we get a little closer to it than at other times. We live in “in-between” times. The Kingdom of God has begun with this birth, but has yet to be fulfilled. We long for peace for all people, because each person is God’s well-loved child.

` Astronaut Frank Borman’s prayer is also a prayer for peace, not just by wishful thinking, but by asking God what each one of us can do to bring that day closer. It echoes St. Francis’ prayer, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…”

There are so many areas of life where we can be instruments of change that may lead to peace. Do not be afraid of change. God is doing a new thing here. Very close at hand, this church in welcoming the stranger, has changed the lives of people who have found a home here. Christ in our hearts plays out by making us the kind of community where there is change…where Christ is known not only to us, but to the world. The signs are here: we are feeding the poor and hungry. Although the clothes closet has moved, we continue to support its work at the Opportunity Center. Through GAIA we are changing the lives of people affected by AIDS in Africa. This sense of mission of bringing God’s peace closer to fulfillment is more than the absence of violence, although such an absence would go a long way to creating peace in other dimensions, it also has an element of justice, where both sides in any conflict come out in a viable position.

The story that took place in Bethlehem so many years ago continues to inspire us. The stillness of that night long ago seems to have captured the possibility of a restored creation. We can put all our hopes and fears out to be taken up by the one who was born this night. For God has brought heaven and earth together in this child. God has given us this great gift. How do we respond? We hear the angels’ message and sing together, “O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel!”

Now Christmas is here again for each and every one of us. The gifts of that first Christmas are as true today as they were on the first Christmas more than 2,000 years ago. Out of God’s constant and abiding love, God waits to give them to you through God’s best gift of all, the gift of God’s own Son, come to earth as a tiny babe born in a manger in Bethlehem. May God fill your heart with his love this Christmas, and may that love overcome your fears and set you free to accept the gifts God came to bring to each of you, gifts of light and hope and peace.
This is the night when heaven and earth are joined in a glorious way, with human beings at the center of the joint. This is the night when “the hopes and fears of all the years” are resolved by a stable and a star. This is the night when we can truly sleep in heavenly peace, because we know that God has entered our world to reclaim it forever. AMEN.

Trinity Journals

Sermons Trinity Voices
Book Reviews
Viewpoints

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.