Christmas 2009

Merry Christmas!

The message of Christmas is that God loves us and all human beings. This was a radical idea in New Testament times and the ancient world. The ancient peoples thought of God and gods as unpredictable and even malevolent. The gods were not friends of humanity, and certainly didn’t love humans. They had to be appeased with sacrifices and magic.

The Christian message proclaimed by the Church from the earliest days is that God loves humanity. God is love. All of creation is an example of the outpouring of God’s love, of the extension of God outside of Himself.

Jesus the Messiah is God extending Himself into the fallenness and imperfection and messiness of human existence. He came to redeem, to rescue, to intervene, to save human beings from the chaos we find ourselves in. This is the message of the angel in tonight’s Gospel reading from St. Luke. “Behold, I bring you good news of great joy, that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

Today, most people in our culture don’t really believe that God is malevolent. That’s because two thousand years of the Gospel message and Christian teaching have impacted even those who are not Christian believers. As a result, we now believe in a much more user-friendly God. But what many people today do believe is that their lives have no real meaning or significance. Henry David Thoreau put it so well almost 200 years ago when he wrote that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

The message of Christmas is that each human person has infinite value and significance in God’s eyes. The Bible tells us we were created in the image and likeness of God. Christmas reminds us that God has intervened into human history to reverse the damage caused by sin. He has done so by Jesus of Nazareth, the God-Man, the Second Adam and Son of God, who came into the world, lived a pure and sinless life, and was then crucified on the cross as Calvary. And that death has reconciled with God every one who believes in Jesus the Messiah.

No one recognized any of this when Jesus was born to Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. Jesus had to be born in a stable because there was no room for him in the local hotel. St. John’s Gospel says that Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, “was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”

Actually, there were some who recognized what was going on with the birth of Jesus. But they were not human beings. They were angels. One angel appeared to a group of humble, poor shepherds and announced the news. And then a whole multitude of angels appeared, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to the human beings with whom he is pleased!”

Many people don’t recognize the message of Christmas today either. They think of Christmas as a time to get a day off from work, buy and receive presents, eat and drink a lot, and spend time with their family. There’s nothing really wrong with that—all those things are good.

But the message of Christmas is so much more than that. It is that Almighty God, the maker and sustainer of the universe, loves you and me and every human being with a love so great that He was willing to put aside His glory and majesty and condescend to be born as a human being. He did this in order that we might be reconciled with Him and be able to live with Him in heaven.

This is truly “good news of great joy.” May the Lord grant each one of us here tonight the ability to truly recognize and believe with all our hearts that Jesus is the Son of God and Savior of all mankind. This can only happen through the power of God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Only the Holy Spirit can bring about that ability to know who Jesus is and to trust in Him for salvation and eternal life.

And so tonight, I implore you to ask God to send the Holy Spirit into your life so that you may truly know Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus is indeed the reason for the season.

Merry Christmas!