Let Your goodness Lord appear to us, that we
made in your image, conform ourselves to it.
In our own strength
we cannot imitate Your majesty, power, and wonder
nor is it fitting for us to try.
But Your mercy reaches from the heavens
through the clouds to the earth below.
You have come to us as a small child,
but you have brought us the greatest of all gifts,
the gift of eternal love:
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Merry Christmas!
Not too long ago, a favorite question of mine was raised in Sunday school. It went something like this “How can we know that a Good and Loving God exists?” It’s not surprising that I have a couple of ideas, but I waited for the high schoolers to answer for themselves.
One answer stood out: “Jesus.”
Now at first, we all kind of rolled our eyes or laughed because of the first unwritten rule of Sunday School: answer any question with Jesus and you’ll probably be at least partially right. In this case, the answer was exactly 100 percent right because in sending his Son to be among us, God gave a startlingly clear vision of Himself. It’s a theme present in the Scriptures (especially in our Gospel lesson today from John), it’s a theme that runs throughout Christian theology (especially the ancient Fathers), and it’s a theme that animates the Church’s life of prayer and reflection.
While in my own period of reflection this Advent, I kept thinking about that Sunday School lesson. And at first I settled on how wonderful God is for taking the time to get to know us by coming for a visit. If I were God, I’d probably just stick to being transcendent and stay in heaven playing XBOX in 7 dimensions or something. I’d be really bad at that job so I’m really glad that God isn’t. God is good and showed us His goodness in his coming. But then I wondered “What does that say about us?”
I asked this because just beneath the surface of would I call a “holiday veneer” there is oftentimes a swirling mess of desperation and hurt. One example I can give you is that on one trip to Publix whilst wearing my collar, I found myself accosted by a fellow who was very concerned about some hot-button issue of the day and wanted me to know about it. He was so concerned about that issue that I suspect he had talked himself out of attending any Church service for Christmas Eve (or ever, really). And the one thing I could tell was that, boy, was this guy hurt. Based on that experience and a professional life spent with folks going through a hard time on Christmas, I think it almost seems natural to say, as if by some intellectual instinct, that God came to save us because, in the immortal words of the Lego Movie and paraphrasing John Calvin, we are just the worst.
But, that’s not it. The Good God that revealed his goodness in the person and work of Jesus did not step into the Bad World that is filled with human badness to make bad things good. We need to remember that God made the world, and us, and saw that it and we are good. What we did, what we do with what God made, that’s where a lot of the problem lies. But God never did a hard restart on his good creation. God saw us confused, frustrated, and burdened by our sin and became one of us to relieve us, and to make good things more like the best thing: Himself.
And he loves us so much, that he came as one of us. Have you ever thought about what that says about us? Again, if I where God, and had to leave heaven, I would come as something way more awesome than a furless (well mostly), bipedal primate. I’d probably come as a flying blue whale or a robot Tyrannosaurus or whatever. You know, something really impressive. And again, It’s a good thing that I’m not God. I think that by the Word made flesh, God is telling us how incredible He thinks we are, despite all the horrible things we do to each other, and all the bad choices we make for ourselves.
You see, the incarnation of the Son of God is His most profound statement that he still thinks what he made is good. It upholds the fairly idiosyncratic and radical idea found in Jewish thought that matter, or stuff, is good because God made it. The incarnation shows us that God Himself thinks we’re valuable enough to come and redeem us. Let that sink in a little. By us, I mean all of us. I mean me, I mean you: especially those of you who struggle with the idea of being valuable.
And since God in his immeasurable light, beauty, and love walked among us as one of us, we can by His grace walk with Him. Where he walked, he brought blessing and therefore we can do that too. We call this Christian charity. It’s a little en vogue these days among some of my peers to think and act “incarnationally” which is difficult because that is barely a word. But what I’m getting at is that our decisions, our lives, should begin to have a marked resemblance to the incarnate Lord’s.
When we actually resemble the incarnate Lord, therefore, we actually answer the Sunday School question for ourselves and for the world that needs to know that God loves it. It answers my second question what the incarnation says about ourselves too, in a way. God loves us, and wants to help us carry the Gospel of His Son into the lives of everyone we meet, perhaps especially in works of charity and hospitality.
And so Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to come. We’ve got a big year ahead of showing God’s love to Sarasota and the world.
Start here by keeping each other in your prayers.
Amen.
Sermon preached by the Reverend David S. Bumsted
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
1 Christmas
28 December 2014