Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Receiving the Incomparable Gift
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Christmas Eve Sermon at the Cathedral 1996There is a kind of remorse that only time and distance can bring. For almost exactly twenty years, I have preached Christmas Eve sermons that were, or tried to be, charming, mildly sentimental, or sometimes, I fear, cute. I did this mostly because I hoped to reach those once-a-year visitors or adult children who were in church for their parents' sake; I hoped to show them that what we were up to in church is important, is useful, and perhaps more than anything, palatable. That was for most of the time. In other years, years when it was hard to see God amid the pain and evil present among us, it was safe (in many senses) to reduce the Christmas story to even more manageable terms, and preach about how children are special, or the shepherds were poor, and so on, without coming to the heart of the good news about the incarnation of the Messiah. In Jesus God and humanity meet.
But this is a new beginning for me, in some ways for all of us, so I will try to get it right, and concentrate for a moment on what was happening and the difference it makes.
First off, it doesn't help to think of the babe of Bethlehem as a human shaped robot with God at the controls, not really a person. Christians talk about how Jesus was a real human baby, with all the endearing and demanding things that being an infant implies, from diapers to dimples -- to make it clear that human nature was taken up fully by God. Why in the world care about that? Well, as the great church father Athanasius said, what Christ has not assumed he has not redeemed. So we aren't talking about maleness, Jewishness, beardedness --but our common humanity, and THAT is what has been taken up into God, what may never be despised.
When I consider that, life is less lonely. To know that our strengths, laughter, tears, fears; our temptations, creativity, mourning are all things that God knows, feelings that God knows what it is like to have, that God understands, all that makes the going less tough. And the point is made again at the other end of the story. At the ascension, all that you and I are is taken back to the right hand of God. What we are can be, is, in the presence of God, without shame or fear.
I am immensely comforted by that, for, as the letter to the Hebrews say, we have a great high priest who can sympathize with us. Not put up with us, but sympathize with us. Christ has not forgotten the poverty and dirt of the stable, nor has he forgotten the struggle with doubt and fear garden of Gethsemane, or death on a cross.
Because that is true, we perhaps need to take ourselves a bit more seriously. And here, of course, is where the shepherds and the children come in: God has valued them in the way Christ took on flesh. In a culture where children were not important, where the poor were not cared for, where surface differences divided people for life: in such a culture the birth of the Messiah took place among the poor, and was announced to minimum wage workers. Mary sang, "He has filled the hungry with good things, and the hope of the poor he has not taken away."
The stable and the shepherds are important because they show that at the Incarnation God honors all humanity, all humanity is to be redeemed. Bethlehem itself was something of a scandal: everyone expected the great king and deliverer to come from a wealthy family in a great city. Instead God chose a little town, and in that little town, a stable. There is a point to all this: God's saving love is for absolutely everyone, even, or perhaps, particularly, those who are at the bottom of the barrel. You aren't talented enough to sink so low that God does not love you. Let me repeat that, please. You aren't talented enough to sink so low that God does not love you. Christmas is a good time to shed self-limiting images and paralyzing feelings of guilt.
To make this point, Luther told the story of a man who refused to kneel, as the custom then was, at the words in the Creed, "For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary." Luther says that immediately the Devil appeared with a thick stick and gave the man a beating. "Fool!," said the devil, "do you not think that if God had come and taken on my form to save me, I would not be on my knees, tears of gratitude in my eyes!"
Ginny forgot to bring the ushers a supply of sticks tonight, but you might think about what it means when you say those words in a few minutes.
"For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary"
Remember those words when you are struggling with your sins and temptations
Remember those words when you rejoice in your loved ones, in beauty, in adventure
Remember those words when you are struggling with the evil of the world; when you are using your last ounce of integrity to remain faithful to a relationship or commitment,
Remember those words when you keep your dignity even when your environment tells you that you are of no worth because of the job you have, or because you don't have a job.
Remember those words when everything in the culture demands that we all be young, beautiful, rich, and self- sufficient.
Remember those words when your heart breaks.
Remember those words when you hold a child in your arms, -- For God has received it all: all of this is not only created by God, but has been taken into God in the child come to redeem us.
Our problem is that our understanding of what it means to be human begins too often with sin, and not with creation and redemption.
"For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary"
Christmas is a time of giving, and it is great and wonderful thing that we can have that good, cleansing feeling that comes with giving gifts from a full heart. But at Christmas we are also safe to give up the power of the giver, and know that we receive, receive the gift of God with us in Christ.
Receiving this incomparable gift means that when we struggle to believe in ourselves, when we struggle to believe in the worthwhileness of living, when we are aware of our limitations and indeed our sins, the child we meet tonight is there for us to love, to pick up; and as we carry him cradled in our arms, we then discover that we are carried, we are embraced, for eternity. God is with us.
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