December 26 sermon

Text: Matthew 2:13-23 and Hebrews 2:10-18
Preached December 26 at Grace Lutheran Church in Nerstrand, MN and Dennison Lutheran Church in Dennison, MN

I hope you got to worship on Christmas Eve. I hope you got to share in the great celebration of our Savior’s birth. I hope you got to hear about the baby born in a stable and laid in a manger—“the little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.”

The beautiful words of that familiar story are a sentimental favorite for many of us. Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth is enacted year after year by children around the world. And, of course, it is immortalized by Linus in the classic Christmas special, A Charlie Brown Christmas.

That’s the story of Christmas we so love to hear, and I hope you got to hear it. It’s important to keep hearing and telling that beautiful, familiar story.

But Matthew reminds us today that the sentimental story we love so much is not the entire story of Christmas. Matthew presents us with some harsh reality. King Herod sees this new baby Jesus as a threat to his power, and he will do whatever he can to prevent that threat from gaining strength. Who knows how many innocent babies died at the hands of an insecure and ruthless ruler?

Sadly, this, too, is part of the story of our Savior’s birth. To be sure, there were shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night, and there was a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and proclaiming the good news of Jesus’ birth.

But Matthew reminds us that the shepherds and angels were not the only ones involved in this story.

We also know the story of Jesus’ birth is not the entire story of our Savior. The story of Jesus the baby merely begins the story of Jesus the Messiah. And this story will culminate in his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. This baby will grow up to suffer and die.

This is not part of the Christmas story we like to talk about, is it?

I wrote in my December newsletter column about the film Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. In it, there’s a scene in which Ricky Bobby leads his family in a mealtime prayer, repeatedly addressing God as “Baby Jesus.”

“Dear Lord, Baby Jesus…” he prays, because he likes the Christmas Jesus best, he says. And maybe we do too. Christmas is a little more “warm and fuzzy” than many other festivals of the church. And a baby in a manger is much cuter and easier to understand than a suffering, dying, resurrected, and ascended Lord.

This week I wrote a blog post that included a video of the wonderful Christmas carol, “What Child Is This?” It’s one of my favorites, primarily because of the second verse: “Why lies he in such mean estate, where ox and ass are feeding? Good Christian, fear, for sinners here the silent Word is pleading. Nails, spear, will pierce him through, the cross be borne for me, for you. Hail, hail the Word made flesh, the babe, the son of Mary.”

It’s a confession of the incarnation—of God becoming human in Christ in order to save us. This baby will grow to bear the cross—for me, for you. This is the good news of the Christian story, even at Christmas!

But I probably screened 10 or 12 YouTube videos before I found one that included the second verse. It seems no one wants to talk about the cross at Christmas time. Yet there it is, looming in this baby’s future.

This world is a broken and messed-up place. It’s a place where kings kill babies and our Messiah ends up on a cross. And still Christ came to us. Here, in the midst of the brokenness, in the midst of the chaos, the sin, the evil, Christ came to us.

In the mess of a barn and the earthy reality of human birth, Christ came to us. The elusive, invisible, incomprehensible God became tangible, understandable, and relatable as a human being like you and me. Nothing is too messy for God. In Christ, God comes to his people. In Christ, God pursues us, mess and all.

We know the human experience includes more mess than just barns and birth. To be human is to suffer, one way or another. Or, perhaps more accurately, one way and another. We all know sorrow, pain, and grief, in their many forms.

And, in Christ, God knows these things as well. We heard in our second reading, “Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.” Jesus Christ is Emmanuel—God with us. And he is with us always, even—or perhaps especially—at our lowest points.

In Christ, God joined us in our suffering. In Christ, God made himself vulnerable to all facets of human life, including the suffering and death that awaited Jesus on the cross. And God continues to suffer with us, for we too are God’s beloved children!

It was not in vain that Christ suffered with us on earth, and the biblical writers want to be sure we know this. We heard from Luke on Christmas Eve that the angels proclaimed the good news of Christ’s birth: “to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” To you comes this news. To you comes this Savior.

We heard in our second reading today from the writer of the letter to the Hebrews: “Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”

In Christ, God comes to us with a purpose! He comes to us to destroy the power of sin, death, and the devil, freeing us from fear to live anew! In Christ, God shows us that he is on our side—that he is for us. And nowhere is God more for us than in the cross of Christ.

In Christ, God acts out of love. Sometimes we imagine God as distant, uninvolved, unattached. But the incarnation turns that idea on its head! Jesus’ joining in our humanity proves to us that God is not impassionate or unconcerned. On the contrary, God is revealed as a loving parent who steps right into his children’s lives!

In Christ, God shows us that he thinks we’re worth loving, in spite of our sin and brokenness. God shows us that he can’t help but reach out to us in love. God shows us that that he desperately wants all people to know his love.

One of my professors, David Lose, recently wrote a book called Making Sense of the Christian Faith, which includes a chapter on the incarnation. In it, he recounts a fairly well-known story that might help to illustrate God’s loving purpose in sending Christ to live among us. You may have heard it before, but let me share it with you anyway.

I’m not sure who wrote this one. It’s about a man, a farmer who never went to church, even though his wife did regularly. Well, one cold and blustery Christmas Eve, after his wife had again pleaded with him but couldn’t convince him to come with her to church, he was reading comfortably by the fire when he heard a thudding against the windows of their house.

He looked out and saw that sparrows, trying to get out of the cold harsh wind and attracted by the light and heat inside, were crashing into the windows of the house. He covered the windows, but that didn’t work.

So he decided to put on his coat, gloves, and hat and go out and open his barn doors wide so the birds could find sanctuary there. But they wouldn’t come in. He put the lights on, but they didn’t come. He spread a trail of cracker crumbs, but they wouldn’t follow. He tried to shoo them in, but that only frightened them more.

“If only,” he thought, “I could become a sparrow for a little while, I could lead them into the barn to safety.” And in that moment he realized that’s what Christmas Eve—the story of God being born as a human—was all about.

The farmer realized that, in Christ, God comes to us in a form we can recognize and comprehend, so that God can communicate with us, show us the way we should go, and ultimately save us.

That really is what it comes down to, isn’t it? In Christ, God saves us. David Lose says in that same book that the incarnation is about God’s promise—a promise of new and abundant life, a promise that God is fundamentally on our side, a promise that death will not have the final word, and a promise that God will never give up on us.

Jesus came to us in the messy complexity of our broken world in order to free us from sin and give us eternal life. This is God’s promise to us, and God keeps his promises. In Christ we have the embodiment of that promise. Jesus is the tangible promise of God, because embodied people need embodied promises.

And so God still comes to us with tangible promises—embodied in water and word, in bread and wine. Still God meets us in our messy lives. Here, in the midst of the brokenness, in the midst of the chaos, the sin, the evil, Christ comes to us. In the midst of our suffering, in the midst of our sorrow and pain and grief, Christ comes to us. When we come to the table, God meets us in physical form, right in the midst of whatever mess we may be facing.

Here God bestows his grace on us over and over again, bringing us forgiveness of sins, new life, and salvation. Here God promises over and over again that Christ came for us, suffered and died and rose again for us.

Here we learn over and over again that God is ultimately on our side, and if God is for us, who can be against us? Not murderous kings, not anything in creation, not even death itself. In Christ, God comes to us, and no mess is big enough or deep enough to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Amen.