December 24, 2024 – Christmas Eve Text: Galatians 4:1-7
Dear Friends in Christ,
Christmas is not ordinary. The song got it right, Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. We may not remember past Easters, Pentecosts, or Labor Days, but we do recall a past Christmas memory. Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, was Christmas nostalgia on steroids. We see pictures and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents – some living, some dead – who pass through our mind. A foretaste of the resurrection. The Episcopal bishop of Boston who wrote “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Phillips Brooks, included this: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” He was right. At Christmas, the past forces itself into the present. This is . . .
“NOT AN ORDINARY DAY”
If Christmas is an extraordinary time of the year for us, it is even more so for God. Like a boxer in the corner of the ring, God was waiting for the bell to square things off with Satan. Christmas is only about us in a derived sense. You cannot say, “Peace on earth,” until you say, “Glory to God in the highest.” God was waiting for what Paul calls “the fullness of time” to reclaim what Satan had taken from Him. God would break into time and become one of us. With the precision of a graceful dancer, God stepped into time and effortlessly adjusted His omnipresence to fit into an eight-pound, ten-ounce baby boy. The Word was made flesh. The mask was taken off the formless face, so we could see, hear, touch Jesus. What was promised was handed around from relative to relative. The promise had given way to the God who was seen, touched, and heard. The infinite was perfectly comfortable in its confinement of the finite. In fact, He loved it. In him, the “fullness,” of God dwells bodily. The inspired version provided by Matthew, Jesus is the Immanuel, “the God with us.”
Europeans do not celebrate a Thanksgiving Day, but they are catching on to the greed of our Black Friday. They too are finding that frenzied holiday shopping can lead to a January reckoning, especially using a debit or credit card, that even the least expensive gifts are not free. Everything comes with a price. Salvation might be free to us – sola gratia – but not to God. The God who gives first pays, and he pays dearly. God is not exempt from the Law that defines Him. God does not pull rank. The God of love is first of all the Lord our righteousness. He stands in line to pay and pay forward for what He did not owe so that we are declared righteous. Release from slavery in the Civil War came with the price of the deaths of thousands of soldiers. So the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “As (Christ) died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
In the cemetery under a classical New England Church in Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire, lies the grave of John Freedom. Born on the west coast of Africa in 1700 and taken to New England as a slave, he accumulated enough money working as a tanner on the side to purchase his freedom. Then he purchased the freedom of the woman who became his wife.
Release from spiritual slavery comes with a greater price. Luther says that God has purchased and won us from all sin. Fifteen hundred years before Paul said it even better. In the Greek of Galatians 4:5 it pictures a man redeeming or buying back a slave in the marketplace. For us, God went into His innermost being, into what He was as God, and took what was dearest to Him – His Son – and gave Him as the purchase price to free us from the slavery of sin. It was quid pro quo. In fact, it was more than that. His death, our life. He paid more than we were worth. He overpaid. He always does. Our justification was not a hollow tin-sounding absolution spoken by an omnipotent God, but it was our emancipation from sin and Satan, written in the blood of Jesus Christ. What God gives us, He first paid for.
We are no longer slaves. We are God’s children. Brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ and heirs of eternal life. The God who redeems us sends the Spirit of that Son into our hearts so that we can speak the language we will perfectly understand only in heaven: “Our Father who art in heaven.”
When gathering the Christmas wrappings you may find a receipt, a reminder the gift is free to you but not to the giver. So it was with God: “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’ So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir.”
Amen.