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Sermon for Christmas 1A

December 30, 2001

There is a prayer in our Prayer Book provided for the Christmas season that I think sums up in a wonderfully economical and theologically correct way what the celebration of Christmas is really all about. It’s a prayer that helps us to focus, not just on the birth of Jesus, not just on the Feast of the Nativity, but on the larger celebration of the mystery of the Incarnation—and to focus on how that mystery touches our lives too. Unfortunately, it’s a prayer we don’t always get to use every year at Christmas time. It is the collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas—and some years, because of the way the calendar works, we don’t have a Second Sunday after Christmas. You see, there are only twelve days between Christmas Day and the Day of Epiphany, and when Christmas comes early in the week (as it has this year), there just aren’t enough days to fit in two Sundays before Epiphany comes. But the prayer for the Second Sunday after Christmas is too good to miss just because the calendar doesn’t fit it in—so I’m going to share it with you now.

This is the collect for Christmas 2: O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Now the thing I like so much about this prayer is the way it speaks of the Incarnation, not just as one thing that happened at one time in history, but the way it speaks of the Incarnation as part of God’s plan, God’s intention, for the whole pattern of creation, the whole shape of the Universe. The prayer speaks of how God first created human nature—how God first blessed us with memory, reason, and skill; how God gave us the capacity to love—love, which is God’s own very nature; how God shared with us the gift of creativity, so that we could join with our Creator to co-create the unfolding story of the Universe. God wonderfully created human nature—and when that nature was damaged by sin, when our rebellion against God’s will for us turned us away from the path God wants for us, when our love and creativity was misdirected by self-centeredness and self-will and self-gratification—then God even more wonderfully restored human nature, then God gave us back dignity and worth and value in our very being. And, the prayer tells us, God gave us that dignity and value by becoming one of us: the Second Person of the Trinity humbled himself to share our human life—and because of that sharing we now have the capacity to share in divine life, we can share in the wisdom and love and creativity that make the stars burn and make the suns rise and set and make the worlds go ’round. Because Christ humbled himself to share our life, now we are exalted to share his life, and to show forth his life in the way we think and the way we feel and the way we act and the way we believe. And that is what the Christmas celebration, that is what the celebration of the mystery of the Incarnation, is really all about: that our lives too are raised up, are given dignity and value and worth, because our lives are shared in the divine life of Christ. The real meaning of Christmas, the real meaning of the Incarnation, is that our lives are shared, our lives are taken up, into a life that is larger than our own.

And that is the message proclaimed to us in our Scripture lessons today as well.

That is the message of the prologue to John’s Gospel, when John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... and the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth.” That’s the part about the Second Person of the Trinity humbling himself to share our human life. But the relationship of sharing goes both ways: because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, John says, therefore, “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” Because Christ has shared our life, therefore we are empowered to share his life, with all the grace and truth, all the light and life, all the power of love, that he has made known among us. Because the Word made flesh has given us power to become children of God, therefore our lives are taken up into a life that is larger than our own.

And Paul says the same thing in the passage from Galatians that we read today: “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” When we address God as Father, as we do every time we say the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, who art in heaven”—when we address God as Father, then we are not just speaking on our own: it is the voice of the Son, it is the voice of Jesus, it is the voice of Christ made alive in us by the Holy Spirit, speaking within our voices, giving our voices depth and height and breadth to speak and shout and sing the glorious love of God. Because God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, therefore our lives are taken up into a life that is larger than our own.

And that is the real meaning of Christmas, the real mystery of the Incarnation: not just that Jesus was born into human life, but that through Jesus our human lives are borne up into God, borne up into divine life, borne up into wisdom and love and creativity that are larger than our own.

And the really good news is that we can experience that life that is larger than our own in all sorts of situations, in all kinds of circumstances, in all times and places of our lives.

This last week I’ve been taking Christmas communion to members of our congregation who, for various reasons, were not able to be in church for Christmas services. One day I took communion to an older woman who has not been able to come to church for some time. We chatted for a while, just talked, before I set out the bread and the wine for communion; then I prayed the collect and read the Christmas gospel and led the prayers of intercession. And then we came to the part where we said the Lord’s Prayer together. And I started to pay attention to the way our two voices were blending as we said the prayer. I looked up and saw that she had put down her little service booklet and was saying the prayer from memory, with her eyes just slightly closed. And it occurred to me that this Lord’s Prayer must have been a constant companion with her through her life, in good times and in bad times, in joy and in sorrow, in bedtime prayers with her children and in Sunday services in church and in quiet times when she needed to reach out to God for help or healing or thanksgiving. I thought of all the experiences that must be gathered into that prayer—and then I thought that here we were, sharing that prayer again, for Christmas communion on a cold December day. And I had a very vivid sense of how our two lives—very different from each other, very separated in years and memories and experiences—how our two lives were caught up together and held together and blessed together in the larger life and larger love of God. It was as if for a moment I could see us as God must see us, with all the delight and wonder and love a parent has for a beloved child. And then the prayer was over, and we shared the bread and the wine, and I packed up the communion set, and we talked a little while longer, and I left. But I left with a deeply abiding sense of how God had been with us there, how God had come in Christ to be in our lives, so that our lives could be taken up in Christ into the life and love of God.

And that is what our Christmas communion, our Christmas holiday, our Christmas celebration, is all about. It’s about the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us, it’s about God sending the Spirit of the Son into our hearts, so that we might receive power to become children of God, so that we might pray “Abba! Our Father!” in thought and word and deed. It’s about rediscovering our dignity and value and worth by sharing the divine life of the one who humbled himself to share our humanity.

And that is something we can celebrate for the twelve days of Christmas, and for all our days to come.

In the Name of God: Yahweh, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Amen.