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Sermon for Christmas Eve

December 24, 2001

“Do not be afraid, for I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

We gather here tonight to hear again the old familiar story of the birth of Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem. We hear again of Mary and Joseph, the displaced couple, far from home, who had to stay in that stable because there was no room for them in the inn. We hear of the shepherds, staying out in the fields all night to look after their sheep, staying out working all night while the more prosperous, more comfortable people of Bethlehem were at home in their beds. And we hear about the angels, messengers from the Creator and Sustainer and Perfecter of all things, messengers who came to say to frightened and lonely people, “Do not be afraid: there is good news, there is great joy, there is a Savior for you and for everyone.”

We come here tonight to hear the Christmas message again—and perhaps this Christmas we are more ready, more willing, more eager to hear that message than on many Christmasses past. This year, perhaps more than most, we are all really looking for some good news to celebrate.

Because for many of us it seems that we have had more than our share of bad news in the weeks and the months that we’ve been through. It isn’t just the lingering ache of the attacks of September 11; it isn’t just the difficulties in the economy that continue to squeeze what we can earn and what we can spend; it isn’t just the sense of unfinished business that seems to be hanging over our nation now that the war in Afghanistan is over, but it still feels like the terrorists are out there somewhere; it isn’t just the personal struggles and illnesses and losses that, for many of us, just seem to be part of the way life is going right now. For many reasons, for many people, it seems as though there has been a lot of bad news lately. Maybe it even seems as though the good news of birth of Jesus can’t find a place to connect with this crazy, messy world we’ve come to know.

But consider for a moment the world that Jesus was born into, the world described in our Christmas Gospel stories. It was a world of vast inequalities in political and military power, where the single ruling superpower of Rome insinuated its culture and its money and its language and its soldiers into all kinds of smaller and weaker peoples and nations. It was a world where those smaller and weaker nations often felt great resentment and resistance to the globalizing tendencies of Rome, and would sometimes respond with rebellions and insurrections and guerilla operations and surprise attacks of terror. The territory of Judea was notorious in Jesus’ time for its violent uprisings against Roman power. The world that Jesus was born into was a world of despotic and paranoid rulers, who often didn’t seem to hesitate to violate the lives of their people to further their own ambitions and agendas. Matthew’s Gospel records that Herod the Great ordered the extermination the male children of a whole region in order to catch the one child whom prophecy said was the true heir to David’s throne. The world that Jesus was born into was a world of economic disparities, where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer; it was a world of racial and ethnic hatreds, where Galileans and Judeans and Jews and Samaritans and Greeks and Romans and Scythians and barabarians all watched each other with suspicion; it was a world where you could be ordered to leave your home and go somewhere else to be counted for a census; it was a world where non-citizens could be tried by a secret military tribunal and summarily executed for crimes against the state; it was a world where terror and warfare and danger and death were everyday occurrences in everyday life

The world that Jesus was born into was not so very different from the world we’ve been living in these weeks and months and years. It wasn’t some ideal realm of peace and goodwill and the sound of angel song—but it was a world so broken and so hurting that it longed to hear the words: “Do not be afraid: there is good news, there is great joy, there is a Savior for you and for everyone.”

And that is the message that our world longs to hear tonight, too. That is the message that is proclaimed to us in the Christmas Gospel. That is the message that we are commissioned to proclaim to the entire world.

Because the good news of the birth of Christ is not just a memory of something that happened a long time ago. The good news is that Christ is borne in us, and that we are reborn in Christ, here and now, in this life and in this world, in the midst of all the crazy messy busy scary realities that make up our day-to-day lives. The good news is that Jesus is our Savior, because in Jesus God has entered into our human life; in Jesus God has taken up the whole crazy messy busy scary business of being human and has given it a new horizon of meaning; in Jesus God has focused all the rays of divine love, the way a magnifying glass focuses light, so that the light of love can be kindled in our hearts too; in Jesus God has come to be one of us, so that in Jesus we might come to be one with God.

And that is good news, that is great joy, that is our salvation—because it means that our lives and our labors, our hopes and our dreams, our joys and our sorrows, our passions and our loves, are not limited, are not controlled, are not held down by all the bad news we’ve been living through lately. It means that for us, too, our lives can have a wider horizon of meaning than the horizon set by fear and anxiety and terror. It means that in us, even in us, God’s love can shine through and be light for all the dark places of this world.

And that is what we celebrate here tonight. On this Christmas Eve 2001, it is our joy, it is our salvation, it is our mission, to hear and proclaim again the words of the angel at the birth of Jesus: “Do not be afraid, for I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people: for you there is this day a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord, the Son of God, Jesus Christ.”

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.