Sermon for Year B, Christmas: "Lessons of the Incarnation"

This sermon was preached on December 24th, 2008 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. Lectionary readings this sermon is based on can be found here.

If you’re going to climb into the pulpit of an Episcopal Church on Christmas Eve -- and if you’re doing that for the first time --like I am, you might be a bit daunted -- like I am. Your first impulse might be to go back to the books and notes you collected during your very recent seminary career -- like I did. And when you do this, you’ll be glad you’re an Episcopalian and glad that being an Episcopalian means that you are an Anglican. Because boy, oh, boy have we Anglicans generated a ton of stuff on the Incarnation -- lots of theology, lots of philosophy, lots of ecclesiology and missiology, lots of sermon and hymns and collects -- all manner of material all about he incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ whose nativity we celebrate tonight.

It’s an amazing wealth of material -- every bit of which I will now review for you in exhaustive detail. Get comfortable, we could be here a while.

Just kidding. I didn’t have that much of a chance to go over too many of my seminary notes this past week. This week was a pretty busy one around here. There were Christmas cookies to be decorated by our church school for the visitors to our Brown Bag Lunch program. There were rehearsals for our Family Service earlier this evening during which the children act out the nativity story as our Liturgy of the Word. There were delicate negotiations to be conducted over who would play the Virgin Mary, there was no small amount of cajoling to be done to get a 4^th grade boy to condescend to play Joseph. There were last minute Christmas Eve acolyte substitutions to be found. There were bulletins to be proofed and the Christmastide service schedule to be posted on the website.

And there were more than a few folks who needed to talk this week about the difficulty of making it through the holidays -- folks who are having a particularly tough time his year.

Somewhere in the middle of it all the painter walked off the job with the sacristy half painted and most of the candlesticks and books and all the rest of the clobber that we use in the worship service strewn around the chancel just when the flower guild folks were trying to ‘green’ the church for this evening’s celebrations.

It was a pretty busy week. And I have to tell you, I loved every minute of it. Especially rehearsing the kids, that was so much fun. Although the rehearsal really went on too long -- which was really my fault. I scheduled it after the cookie decorating and it was just too much for the kids to do in one day. One of the moms had to tell me, “You know, Father Mark, when the kids start to puke -- and one of them just did -- it’s time to call it a day.

That’s one bit of wisdom I wouldn’t have found in my seminary notes, I can assure you.

Yes, the kids were great, and so were the people who are struggling. you know how precious our lives are when you listen to someone grieving life’s loss, and you’re reminded of how good we are down deep, when you hear someone struggling to do what is right when the world seems to be conspiring against what is right.

So… with all that going on, I didn’t get to review many of my notes on Anglican theologies of the Incarnation this week. But I can tell you a little bit of what I leaned in seminary. Our Anglican emphasis on the Incarnation has shaped our particular view of the faith. We are not the people who are at odds with the material world. We know that God is found in everyone and everything. That’s why we pledge to respect the dignity of every human being in our baptismal vows and why we feel called by God to protect and preserve our earth as God’s creation.

Our incarnate God is found in every aspect of our lives, in good times and in bad. And our witness to this God takes us into every field of human endeavor, into politics, into the arts, into advocacy for social justice. It is out belief that God entered our material world and entered our humanity itself, and that is at the foundation of our sacramental spirituality. It is the Incarnation that makes it possible for the water of baptism to bring new life, and for the bread and wine of the Eucharist to become flesh and blood.

It is our belief in the ongoing Incarnation that helps us to meet the challenges that come our way as history progresses. It was our emphasis on Incarnational theology that helped Anglicanism accept the advances of science in the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries. If the mysteries of evolution and molecular structure were only now being discovered, it was just part of the mystery of God’s creation being revealed to us now, just as a part of God’s mystery was revealed to us in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago.

I’ll only quote one Anglican theologian to you -- a very recent one and one that is a great favorite of many. Verna Dozier, a Washington, DC school teacher and theologian and advocate for the laity in the Episcopal Church was a powerful Anglican voice for the importance of the Incarnation in the constant evolution of the church. She wrote, “It is comforting for the church to declare the Bible as the Word of God instead of taking seriously what the bible says -- that Jesus himself is the Word of God… How troubling if God came as a person and not a book! And if that person is eternally living eternally in communication with God’s people, one age can eternally say to another, ‘Your understanding is not my understanding. God has a new word to say to us.’”

This emphasis on the Word made flesh rather than the Word written down has helped Anglicans remain vitally engaged in the world in which we live and move and have our being as a manifestation of the God in which we live and move and have our being.

Well, that’s a little of what seminary taught me about the Incarnation of God in Jesus that we celebrate in the Feast of the Nativity tonight.

Now here’s something of what I’ve learned on the job this week.

For one thing, children know more about the immensity of the miracle of the Incarnation that you might expect. You can see it when a 3^rd grader portraying the Angel Gabriel stretches her arms as wide as she can as if to show just how immense is the news that she brings to Mary. For surely this momentous news of the Word becoming flesh is huge -- it’s THIS BIG!

For another thing, Mary and Joseph are the hardest roles to cast every year for completely different reasons. Almost all little girls want to be Mary; hardly any little boys want to be her husband.

Reminders about the Christmas rota should go out a month ahead of time, not a week ahead of time. No matter how deep your bench is, it thins out at Christmas.

The painter may walk off the job but the church will look beautiful on Christmas Eve because the people of God in this place believe in worshiping their God in the beauty of holiness.

And maybe the most important thing I’ve learned on the job this week that relates directly to the Incarnation is this: our struggles bring us very close to what is sacred. Human life is precious, else we wouldn’t mourn for those we love whom we have lost -- nor would we grieve over the wrongs done to us and to others if we didn’t believe deep down that the Incarnation in all of us is very real.

Whether we have struggled on our way to this Christmas or not, most of us have come here tonight to find a bit of renewal. We come to recover or reinvigorate that sense of wonder and hope that Christmas always brings. We need it, else we wouldn’t celebrate it every year. We need it now, I think -- in the depths of winter, near the time of the shortest days and the longest nights of the year. Now is when we need to reconnect with the Light of the World born so long ago.

That sense, that feeling of new life and new light is one that I know you’ll find here in this place on this night.

Not because of what this building is, not because it looks especially beautiful tonight (though it does), not because of what I might have to say to you.

I know that you’ll find that new life here tonight because you brought it with you when you came through the door -- because the wonder and hope of the Incarnation that was born in Bethlehem is in you. The life that came into being on the first Christmas is your life. You are the Light of the World just as surely as Jesus is. For why else would God have been born in human form if not to remind us, to prove to us, to make plane that we are God’s image in God’s world, and that we are one with God, now and forever.

Well, those are the fruits of my on the job training so far. It’s only been four months or so -- I’m sure there’s a lot more to learn.

But this is what I’ve learned so far this week about God’s Incarnation in this world:

o Our children have much to teach us about God’s presence in the world.

o Make your casting decisions carefully, send you rota reminders early.

o God’s people coming together create worship and praise that is always of great beauty and profound holiness.

o Our struggles are sacred.

o And when the kids start to throw up, it’s time to call it a day.

Merry Christmas!

© The Rev. Mark Robin Collins