• Home Page

• Upcoming Events

• Last Sunday's Sermon

• Monthly Newsletter

• Missions of the Church

• Fall Tour of Homes

• Becoming a Member

• Our Staff

• Church Heritage

• Wedding Information

• Affiliations

• Links

And here is my Christmas Eve sermon.

December 24, 2002

As many of you know, I had the opportunity to go to Israel for the first time in late December 1994 and early January 1995. I have many indelible memories of that trip, but one of the most significant comes from our visit to Qumran. For those of you who don't know, Qumran was the home of the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.

That was a group which was so disgusted by the way that the religious leaders of the time had compromised their faith in order to collaborate with the enemy Romans that the entire community abandoned Jerusalem altogether. They moved out into the desert about a day's walk from Jerusalem and tried to establish what they felt was a holy congregation, untainted by the concerns of the world.

In fact, they were convinced that if they were able to keep God's laws perfectly - even if it were only for a single day - that God would honor their efforts by sending the Messiah at last. And who's to say that that idea didn't come from God, given the timing of Jesus' birth during the heyday of the Qumran community?

Most scholars believe that the residents of Qumran continued to wait for the coming of the Messiah until the beginning of the great Jewish rebellion against Rome in the year 65, which they saw as the beginning of the end of the world. These scholars believe the Qumran community joined that rebellion and were destroyed by the power of the Roman army.

A small group of scholars, however, believe that at least some of the Qumran community joined the followers of Jesus and eventually formed the community that produced the gospel of John and the letters of John in the New Testament. There is no way to prove that, but there are many similarities between the writings of the Qumran community and the books attributed to John.

In any case, during my trip to Qumran in January 1995, we were given an extensive tour of the archeological ruins, including being shown some of not-very-distant caves in which the Dead Sea manuscripts were found. And then we had a little bit of free time to roam around before being herded back into the bus to travel to the next site.

As I stood there surrounded by those desert ruins and thought about of the sacrificial faithfulness of that group and the tremendous gift the discovery of their library has given modern scholars, I was reminded of a dream I once had not long after my mother died. I dreamed that I saw my mother again and ran up to hug her, but as my arms went around her, she disintegrated into dust and my arms closed around nothing at all. It was quite a shattering dream at the time.

There at Qumran, as I thought about the towering achievements of that community, I wondered about the people behind those achievements. Like the dream of my mother, had they simply crumbled into dust as well? Were those people nothing more than the sum of their achievements?

And isn't that really a universal question? Aren't we as humans regularly trying to find some sort of significance in our lives - significance that focuses on more than just what we do, but also who we are? Don't we often wonder - especially when we are faced with the death of a loved one - what is the meaning of life?

Fred Kane tells of a field in Ireland not far from Tara. "In that field is a gently rising mound made with stones and covered with soil and turf called Newgrange. They say that its been there for thousands of years going back before the Irish kings, before the Druids, back to the mist of prehistory.

"In the center of the mound is a narrow opening through which only one person can pass. You enter through an eighty-eight foot long passage and descend slowly to a central chamber. It is a burial chamber. If you stand in the center of that burial chamber and look back up the passageway toward the entrance it's like looking through the sights of a rifle. That sight is set in alignment with the heavens so that on the day of the winter solstice, and on that day alone, the sun rises over the horizon directly in line with the entrance, and light pours down the passage filling the chamber with the radiance of its rising. "At Stonehenge, across the Irish Sea in England on Salisbury Plain there are stones aligned with the heavens so that they too can mark the seasons. They mark the two solstices and the two equinoxes.

"[...] There is a human longing to know that this world is dependable and reliable. Through[out] history people have wanted to know that the power controlling the universe is trustworthy and faithful and that this power is not only on our side, but is concerned with us. The only ways ancient people had of knowing that their gods were faithful was to test the faithfulness and dependability of nature. So every year they watched the journey of the sun and marked its climb across the heavens.

"[...] So these astronomical instruments like Newgrange and Stonehenge [...] were built to observe the sun's movement, especially at the time of the winter solstice, to see if again this year by the mercy of God, the sun would again be reborn and rise in the heavens."

In many ways, the birth of Jesus served the same function. It was a sign that the God who created the heavens and the earth cared enough about human beings to come to this world and share their life. God cares about the world of Osama bin Ladin and George W. Bush, of Bill Clinton and Timothy McVeigh, of Steven Speilberg and Billy Graham, of all the good and bad and mixed people in the world - including you and me.

For some reason, we want to clean up the whole story to make it fit better into our warm, fuzzy holiday feelings. But the Christmas story was not a quiet, antiseptic event. Instead, it was a real world incident, filled with risks and surprises and dangers.

It's the story of a young, unmarried, mother-to-be, who faced rejection at the hands of her fiancé and the incessant whispers and knowing glances from the people of her village. In that culture, premarital sex could cost you your life. It could certainly have cost her her fiancé who knew that he wasn't the father of her baby. But Joseph chose to believe Mary and take upon himself those whispers and knowing glances.

Christmas is the story of an oppressive occupation army and the extorted taxes used to finance that oppression. It's the story of a long, painful journey - probably on the unforgiving back of a donkey - for a woman in the last stages of pregnancy.

It's the story of a couple forced to spend the night in which their first child was born in a noisy, dirty, stinky barn, because there was no room for them in the inns and they were too poor to afford the kind of bribery it would take to squeeze them in with the rest of the guests. So they had to make due and be grateful for the simple shelter of the barn.

But even that shelter was soon taken away from them when the king of their own country tried to murder their baby and they were forced to escape into Egypt. That's what history records as the events of the first Christmas.

But those events certainly aren't anything like what the people expected for God's long-awaited Messiah. Naturally, they looked for someone who could out-Caesar Caesar, strength against strength - especially since it was the year that Augustus was celebrating the 25th anniversary of his rule - the time he wrested control of the world from his chief rival by sheer brute force.

Surely the God who created the heavens and the earth could show Caesar a thing or two and put him in his place once and for all. But that's not what God chose to do. Instead, this is how one author (Frederick Buechner) describes what God did on that first Christmas:

"The claim that Christianity makes for Christmas is that at a particular time and place God came to be with us Himself. When Quirinius was governor of Syria, in a town called Bethlehem, a child was born who, beyond the power of anyone to account for, was the high and lofty One made low and helpless. The One who inhabits eternity comes to dwell in time. The One whom none can look upon and live is delivered in a stable under the soft, indifferent gaze of cattle. The Father of all mercies puts Himself at our mercy."

And what was the point of that plan? To show that no one and no place and no thing is beyond the care and concern of God. The powerless, homeless and outcast are just as dearly loved by God as the rich and powerful are. Christmas doesn't try to paint a happy face on the world and tell us that we always live in sunshine. Instead, Christmas reminds us that when we most feel the darkness of the world, we can be assured that the Light of the World shines in that darkness and the darkness is completely unable to overcome it. What that means in a single word is hope.

Alastair Barrett tells of a Christmas program in a church in an inner city in England. One of the members of that congregation is named Joyce and she struggles with chronic low self-esteem and mental illness. But she was asked to play an angel for the program. At first she declined, but with the encouragement of others, she reluctantly agreed.

Barrett says. "As the heavenly host appeared in the organ loft to sing 'Joy to the World' to the shepherds in the fields, Joyce sang her heart out. At end of the song, she turned to the woman next to her, with tears in her eyes. Connie smiled at Joyce as the two of them stood there, wearing their pipe-cleaner halos and frayed white choir robes. She was used to seeing Joyce's face, with its signs of her struggle with inner voices of hate and self-loathing. But today was different. 'I never knew I could be an angel,' Joyce whispered."

That's the heart of Christmas - God took on human limitations to become one of us, knowing our pains and fears and temptations and yet still embracing us as beloved sisters and brothers. The Word became flesh and lives among us even today.

One author (David Klutterman) writes, "Mary and Joseph made a loving home for [...] Jesus. Will we? Will we invite the person of Jesus into our lives? Will we care for that presence, listen to him crying, love him as our brother? He is in our world now, today, and will be tomorrow, and in the New Year and beyond. [...] He will be in the laughter and cries of children; he will be in the cries of families who have been broken apart by poverty and despair and violence; he will be in the cries of the elderly who are alone and frightened; he will be in our own cries of pain; he will be in the laughter of people coming together in love.

"[...] May each day be Christmas, and may we tell the story by our lives each day: the story of how we cared for the presence of Christ entrusted to us, by caring for each other and for ourselves, as we listen to the cries and laughter, and love as we have been loved. May Christmas not be identified only with the children, or the poor, or the outcast, but with all of us, as we risk ourselves to love and be loved, even as God does in this blessed Son, born to bring us love in the world this day and always." Amen.