December 25, 2024 - The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Well, Merry Christmas, Epiphany! Joy to the world, the Lord has come, let earth receive her king. Joy to South Haven, our Lord has come, let us here today receive our king, our Savior. I know that some of us here were in attendance last night also, so we tried to save a few of the best-known songs for this morning, like that one, Joy to the World. You won’t hear the same message from last night either, don’t worry, and for those of you joining us this morning for the first time, welcome. Merry Christmas.
As you might expect, our family spent the last 12 or so hours with very little sleep, excited for what was to come in the morning, wrapping last-minute presents, sleeping for maybe a few minutes, and then excitedly opening presents, eating breakfast, and getting ready for church again. Excitement is in the air, and so is joy. Today, we’ll have Christmas dinner with my parents, and then, maybe, Abbey and I will have a chance to collapse into couches while the girls play with their toys. It’s a beautiful, jolly and joyous day, based in abundant, unbelievable love, as I preached about a bit last night.
“Joy to the World,” though... this day, more than that third week of Advent where we referenced joy, this day really is all about joy. I preached on this last night too: our joy as Christians is not based on (or a result of) expensive presents or good food, but instead in the ridiculous, unbelievable fact that God loved us so much that God chose to be with us, incarnate as a baby boy in a manger, taking on the very nature of humankind, of the suffering servant found in Isaiah 53, who would later bear our infirmities and carry our diseases, loving us all the way to and through the cross. Our joy is built on the foundation of Christmas Day, that God came to be with us through it all, and that is very, very good news.
Many Christians, though, engage with Christmas as something of an annual rite of passage, or as a reminder that they once grew up in a church. There’s a critique of so-called Chr-easter Christians, those who show up maybe twice a year on, you guessed it, Christmas and Easter. I don’t like this critique, I don’t like criticizing anyone really, especially those who make time to come to church! I have some Chreasters in my family, I have been one of those myself in seasons past, and if you yourself are one of those or you know some of those, know that you are welcome here! Wherever you are on your journey of life and faith, you are welcome here, no exceptions. It's kind of our motto. We love people here, and there’s grace here, that’s what church should be, and often is not. No judgments on others need be passed; we should all be happy that church still has a foothold in anyone’s life when there are so many well-packaged narratives, alternatives that are more attractive, on offer out there these days.
As you might expect from that paragraph though about misguided critiques of Chreaster Christians (yeeesh), there are, sadly, regularly attending Christians who engage Christmas without much joy, without much love or grace for others, for those they deem unworthy, those who don’t celebrate well enough or properly or often enough, or even those who don’t say the right words in greeting this holiday season. Christmas tends to become, for some, just another competition to be or to have the best, or Christmas can become just another point of contention in their culture war, a culture war which, in the context of the incarnation, God with us, God loving us... any culture war makes just such little sense. Any “us vs. them” is complete nonsense in light of today, in light of Christmas, in light of the gospel. God loves us, so love your neighbor, even love your enemies; love, love, love.
Instead, thankfully, here on this Christmas day in the morning, you are all, we are all invited to experience joy unlimited, an outrageous, an amazing joy, a joy that makes us sing, a joy that makes us dance, a joy that makes us do crazy things, like love without any limit or condition, like come to church in the middle of a Wednesday morning in December. In one of my first sermons here at Epiphany, back in July, I preached about a similar type of joy, one that King David experienced in 2 Samuel chapter 6. In that story, David had been triumphant in battle and had taken the city of Jerusalem, and he was finally able to bring the Ark of the Covenant into the city. At the front of this parade, David danced, undignified before the Lord, as he carried the very presence of the Almighty God, encased in this ornate box, into his city where he would build God a temple in which to dwell forever. David’s wife scoffed at him for his joyful dancing, saying he looked like a fool, saying such dancing was vulgar, dishonorable.
But David replied, “I will make myself even more undignified than this.” He was just so overcome with joy in the presence of the Lord.
There’s a parallel here with our gospel story, with Christmas today, if we have eyes to see it. In the Old Testament, we find God’s presence encased in an ark, in a big and ornate box, and its arrival in Jerusalem brought such joy to David that he was overwhelmed by it. In today’s gospel, we find that Mary herself is the New Testament’s Ark of the Covenant... God is living within her. And through her, God would prove that God would no longer be contained in boxes or hidden behind veils in temples; God was coming to be with and live with us. God’s very spirit lived in the virgin womb and was birthed into the world incarnate as a baby boy this Christmas morning, some two thousand years ago. And that boy, fully God and fully human, Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem, would live all the difficulties of life that we go through ourselves, and he would love so much, so unconditionally, that he would be killed for it, and that love would change the world.
Will our response today to Immanuel, God with us, be David’s style of abundant, undignified joy? Will we love as this Jesus loved? Will we show ridiculous amounts of grace to our neighbors? Will we celebrate this reason for this season beyond just today? Can we keep “Joy to the World,” the whole world, as the song of our hearts beyond December 25th?
Good Christian friends, I ask you to continuously rejoice, with heart and soul and voice, all the year long. We have much to be thankful for, and we have much to be outrageously joyful about: the Almighty Creator God came to be with us, born of a virgin, and then continues, two thousand years later, to come to be with us all this day and every day, and heaven and nature sing. Merry Christmas.
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