Co-missioners,
A year ago today I heard from a Crossings veteran and dear friend who was gnashing her teeth over the sermon she had heard two nights earlier at an otherwise fabulous Christmas Eve service. There was no Gospel, she said.
This friend was much in mind as I got today’s post ready. She’ll have been at the same church this year that she went to last year. If she woke up gnashing her teeth again this morning, perhaps she’ll find some comfort here. So too with others who may have driven home from Christmas services feeling badly underfed.
What you’re getting here is my last Christmas Eve sermon at the congregation I served for twenty-eight years in Greater Cleveland. I preached this in 2021. COVID was still disrupting our lives, so that became the entrée into the evening’s great questions: why was Christ born? And why should this have been of use and surpassing value to those who were together in that church building (or livestream feed) on that particular night?
On stumbling across this in my files some days ago it struck me that the issues of 2024 overlap in countless ways with those of 2021. That’s certainly so of what bubbles beneath the surface at Steps Two and Three of the Crossings-style diagnosis that shapes what’s being said here. It bears re-hearing. So much more for the good news of God’s response to this in the person of Mary’s baby. So here it is. Christus natus est as the Latin monks once sang. Christ is born, as we tend to say it in our neck of the woods. However it gets said on the Second Day of Christmas, let the responding Alleluias be nothing less than rousing. Let the Alleluias on this Second Day of Christmas be nothing less than rousing.
Peace and Joy to one and all!
Jerry Burce,
on behalf of the Crossings Community
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God’s Christmas Break
A Homiletical Supplement, Crossings-Style
From Christmas 2021
“Unto us a Child is born; unto us a Son is given.”
Amid the darkness of this night, grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
And yes, a dark night it is in Northeast Ohio—in our own Cuyahoga County in particular. Another dark night. Another COVID Christmas.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course. If anything, that makes this year’s Christmas even more discouraging than last year’s was. At least then we knew well in advance how dim the lights would be, so we got ready for it. This time around a lot of us started December with happy plans for family visits and get-togethers—maybe a trip or two downtown for the holiday events we’ve come to cherish, all of which got cancelled last year. Here at church we dreamed dreams of brighter celebrations in a somewhat fuller building where most everyone could feel relaxed and comfortable, especially if they’d been vaccinated.
And then along came COVID’s omicron variant—with a bang, a vengeance. Two weeks. That’s all it took. On Wednesday our county was ranked third of all the counties in the entire U.S. for COVID infection. A lot of us at Messiah have caught it. Too many. For the second Christmas in a row we need to pray for stretched and weary hospital workers, to say nothing of the sick people they’re struggling to keep alive, or so we’re hearing.
It’s enough to make you want to pray another prayer. “C’mon, God, give us a break.” That sounds rude and sassy, to say the least, but go ahead. Spit it out. You might as well. God knows you’re thinking it—you and everyone else in Cleveland tonight. I’ll bet Joseph thought the same thing that first Christmas Eve when he knocked on the door and the innkeeper said, “Go away. We’re full.”
“C’mon, God. Give us a break!”
That’s what Joseph mutters. Under his breath, of course.
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With that, here’s one of the great gifts of Christmas we often miss. Now is the year of all years to think about it; to thank God for it.
It’s the freedom we have in this baby in the manger—this man on the cross as he’s going to become—to, yes, spit it out. To speak our minds—our sinful minds, to put it bluntly, the ones we were born with that don’t trust God the way they should.
Enough already with the pious pretensions we hide behind the way Adam hid behind the bushes when God came looking for him in that story most all of you know. Christ was born to put an end to this nonsense. He came to save the scared and shifty sinners who indulge in it. So tonight, with our eyes on that baby, let’s dare to admit what’s really going on up here, between our ears, in these sinful minds of ours.
Sinful minds throb with opinion. My opinion.
Sinful minds crackle with judgment. My judgment.
Sinful minds insist on choices. My choices.
Put ten or even two sinful minds in the same room for an hour and what have you got? Disagreement. Sprinkle in some stubbornness, and what have you got? Conflict. Stir in some selfishness and the misery begins.
That’s the issue God is dealing with tonight in Cuyahoga County.
Fill a county with a million stubborn, selfish sinners, each with their own opinions, their own judgments, each insisting on having things their own way—and what can you expect when a virus blows in? Of course it lays them low.
Not that any of them will accept accountability for this. Instead the blame game starts. And at the end of the game—that unwinnable game—the whining kicks in with the same ugly nonsense that Adam blew in God’s face back there in the garden. “The woman you gave me who fed me this fruit….” “The neighbor you gave me who won’t wear a mask….” In any case, God, you could make all this go away with a snap of your fingers, so why aren’t you doing it? Get on the stick already or else I won’t believe in you. So there!
And with that, welcome to tonight’s America if welcome is the word. Telling God to soak his head is the trending fashion of the day.
Not that everyone will go quite so far as to drop God altogether. You’re proof of that. So are the folks attending Mass right now down the street at St. Angela’s. We share the same piety, the same sensibility, the one that tells us not to get in God’s face—bad idea, you know. So we complain behind his back. That’s not so hot an idea either. Even this begs God to say to us what he said to Adam as he pushed him from the garden. “If you don’t like the way I’m doing things, have at it. Go live on your own. Go die on your own.”
There’s a lot of dying going on in our county these days, in the world for the matter—and it’s not just from COVID. It has always been like this, of course. There was a lot of dying going on in that little town of Bethlehem so long ago.
Then all of a sudden one night a lamp got lit in a ramshackle stable at the edge of town.
Turns out, you see, that God hates the dark and the way it swallows people up—people he made. Death is the final and permanent darkness. God hates that even more.
That’s why Christ the Child was born, why Jesus the Son was given.
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So here’s what I invite you to remember tonight—to praise God for as well.
From Wikimedia Commons
This baby in the manger is God’s best and final answer to that sassy prayer of snarling sinners: “C’mon, God. Give us a break!”
This baby in the manger is God’s best and final answer to shepherds grumbling about the cold; to townspeople upset by the sudden flood of visitors; to folks who did manage to land a room in the inn, only now they’re cursing the bedbugs.
Mary’s baby is God’s best and final answer to Joseph himself as he wanders off in raging dismay to find the manger she’ll need for the baby as soon as it’s born.
This baby is God’s best and final answer to our virus-riddled county tonight. Sure, he could snap his fingers and the thing would disappear—it’s not for nothing we call him Almighty. But suppose he did, what then? A million people would still be throbbing with their opinions, still crackling with their judgments, still insisting on their choices—our sinner’s choices.
We’d still be grieving God and spoiling his world. We’d still by dying for the simple reason that we’re just not good enough to live forever. God who reads our sinful minds is much too good himself to let us do that. There has got to be an end to the messes we make, to the misery we stir up. There has got to be an end to the hurt we cause as we do things our way—our selfish way.
So in steps God on Christmas Eve to do things God’s way. His self-less way. Absurdly selfless when you pause to think about it.
God drops his Son, his one and only begotten Son, smack into the middle of our mess, our misery.
He puts him here so that God can be with us in this mess instead of merely above it, the way we sinners think he is.
God puts him here to suffer what we suffer. That includes the misery we stir up among each other.
God puts him here to be yelled at the way we yell at each other; for us to scorn the way we scorn each other. There’s a whole lot of that going on in our country right now. There’s too much of it going on in God’s own church, for that matter.
God puts his Jesus here where we’ll all help to kill him the way we help to kill each other.
God puts him here to show us up for the rebellious sinners we are. He also puts him here to end the rebellion and to save the rebels.
God puts his Jesus here to die so we can live. Try and figure that one out. It’s God’s way. Not our way. The most astonishing thing about Christmas is that God should think that we were worth it. What kind of judgment is that? It makes no sense. Yet there it is: the real break God gives us. The break we didn’t ask for, the break we don’t deserve. Who of us would cut this kind of slack for people who can’t stand us and treat us like dirt?
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And here’s one more thing—for me right now, a final thing—that God had in mind when he put his baby in a manger. Our second reading tonight talks about it when it says that “our great God and Savior Jesus Christ…gave himself to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people who are eager to do good.”
In plain English: Christ was born not only to rescue us from sin and death, but to change our sinful minds. He was put in that manger to replace those minds with the mind we have in him, as St. Paul puts it.
This kind of mind throbs with Jesus’ opinions. It crackles with Jesus’ judgments. It insists on Jesus’ choices. It trusts in God no matter what, and come what may.
This kind of mind is a gracious mind. Absurdly gracious. It’s not afraid to catch it in the neck for being so kind. It doesn’t flinch from looking foolish in a world committed to the proposition that forgiveness is for fools.
You’ll see once again how this mind operates when you come to communion tonight. Your Lord Jesus Christ, his body in this bread, his blood in this cup—this same Lord Jesus Christ will throw his arms around you, no questions asked. He’ll wrap you again in his love, his life, no questions asked. He’ll underscore the promises he died to secure for you, the ones he rose again to keep repeating, no questions asked. For all I know, you’ll catch him doing the same for a person or two that you have questions about. Forget those questions, Jesus will say. Follow my lead.
No one asked those shepherds if they’d been naughty or nice when they walked into the stable. No one barked at them to go take a bath first or to prove they weren’t sick. Had they gotten their shots? It was quite beside the point. There in the manger lay the Gift of Gifts, the very Son of God. He simply cooed and smiled at them, no questions asked. Later he’d do the grown-up version of this for crooks and thieves among so many others.
Suppose that every Jesus-trusting person in Cuyahoga County were to operate with that mindset this week. Now that, I think, would come as a huge, huge break in the misery of these days. A gift-of-God break, to put it honestly. His is the choice and power that puts trust in our hearts and the mind of Christ in our heads.
So in our prayers this Christmas, let’s all beg God to form this mind of Christ in us, or rather to push that project forward. Truth is, it’s already underway in each of you. Again, you wouldn’t be here otherwise. And now that you are here, I for one get to look at you. And when I do I thank God for you. I can’t help but recall some ways I’ve seen the grace of God in Christ working in you and flowing through you as a gift to someone else.
Chew on this idea tonight. It’s a true idea. It’s God’s idea. You yourself are one of the presents God is giving to the world this Christmas—to our sin-and-virus riddled corner of the world in particular. That’s why he’s wrapping your mind and heart in Jesus again this very evening. Off you go and be the gift you are.
I pray you’ll do your Savior proud as you trust and serve him this year, and in all the years to come.
The peace of God, surpassing all understanding, keep your minds and hearts in Christ Jesus.
