December 25, 2024 – Christmas. Texts: Exodus 40:17-21, Titus 3:4-7, John 1:1-3, 14

Dear Friends in Christ,

When you see your gifts piled by your chair you learn from their sizes you are not getting a car. Even in childhood your brain could figure out what might possibly be inside. That is because you understand something. A thing can only hold what will fit inside.
It is said, “The finite is not capable of the infinite.” It seems a good rule of thumb. A new car cannot be where it pleases to be. But the key to a new car could be in a small package. Let’s not rule out God being in a package that is too small. The truth is – and we see this best at Christmas – the Lord is big enough to make himself small. He is without bounds. He was before space and time were. He is above them. He is to come.
“INFINITE GIFTS IN FINITE WRAPPINGS?”
John introduces us to Jesus, born of Mary at Christmas and laid on rude straw, as the God we can see and touch with our hands. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
When God stuffed himself into Jesus there was nothing left for us to seek or find or figure out. This action transforms all mystery under almighty God.
We don’t need to wonder, “what is He doing up there with all that almighty power?” We marvel in faith that His almighty power is always aiming precisely at what Jesus is about. “The Word became flesh, . . . and we have seen his glory.” And that is a great gift in a small package of swaddling cloth – the gift of faith.
God in Jesus puts the infinite in the grasp of our finite minds. Glory, grace, and truth come down to earth. God’s glory, God’s grace, God’s truth slept in a manger, hung on a cross, tucked in a tomb, rose from the dead.
God fills a finite thing with His infinite saving power. His Word makes water a saving bath. Titus writes that we are given “a washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.” Justified by Christ’s grace we are heirs with the hope of eternal life.
In the Holy Supper, the finite and lowly, mere bread and wine, by His creative Word are made to contain the body and blood of the infinite-become-finite, the immortal-become-mortal, the God-become-man, the dead-become-alive. God can do what He wants, and what can our simple minds say besides amen to the Word who became flesh.
Learn this Christmas, then, not to doubt what God can fit in the packages He sends you, or count them as small among supposedly bigger things. We have run off after the big, wide world and left behind Jesus, seeming small in the manger or powerless in the darkness on the cross. But in that swaddling flesh is the Word that made it all, the light and life of men – and in that flesh lifted up upon a cross is the glory of God revealed to be seen and to save. We’ve neglected the little packages in which God saves – both the receiving of them and the giving of them – in favor of those big packages that always prove empty in the end.
Thanks be to God, the one little package remains – wrapped as a baby and purple robe and shroud, to be wrapped up then for us in Word and water and bread and wine – and, wrapped up so we can find and have it, this one infinite gift. This Word made flesh tells us that the One who is infinite can be where He wants to be – namely Jesus in Word and Sacrament. He can do what He wants to do there – namely, save you and me. Don’t rule God out because you think He’s too big to fit where He’s told you He is. He fits where He wants to, and does what He wants to do and where – that is here in these things. The Word who made all things and became flesh says so. In these little packages we can grasp, all the mystery of God is wrapped up in his will to save – and where the packages are to be grasped, there is the gift of faith. This gift is yours and may it bring you everlasting joy this Christmas and always.
Amen.

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.

December 22, 2024 Text: Hebrews 10:5-10

Dear Friends in Christ,

I have always liked the Peanuts comic-strip because it gives a good picture of life. Lucy is talking with her brother who is sucking his thumb and has his security blanket. Lucy says: “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before…Do you see that hill over there? Someday I’m going over that hill and find the answer to my dreams…someday I’m going over that hill and find happiness and fulfillment. I think, for me, all the answers to life lie beyond those clouds and over the grassy slopes of that hill.”
Well, Linus removes his thumb, points toward the hill and responds, “Perhaps there’s another little kid on the other side of that hill who is looking this way and thinks that all the answers to life lie on this side of the hill.” Lucy stares at Linus for a bit, then turns toward the hill and shouts, “Forget it, kid!”
Isn’t that just like us? Always looking for something better? We figure we go here and there, and that will make a difference. Our figuring. Our doing.
Advent. Preparation for Christ’s birth. The coming of the Best of Heaven to a befuddled world looking to itself for answers . . . and always coming up short. Here is the direction this morning . . .
“GOD’S DOING”
Listen to the first part of verse 5 and then all of verse 8. “Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, ‘Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired.’” That was verse 5. Now verse 8. “You have neither desired not taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offering and sin offerings (these are offered according to the law).”
These words take us back to the ceremonial law that God established under Moses. Long before the birth of Christ. So, why is it mentioned here? Well, God established a system of sacrifices and offerings, not to appease God or gain his favor, it was to show people their sin and need of a Savior. The entire Old Testament sacrificial system was to direct the people to the coming Messiah…the Christ.
Recall these words from Psalm 50: “I do not rebuke you for your sacrifices or your burnt offerings, which are ever before me. I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine…If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it.”
When an animal was sacrificed, the cry of the animal, the smell of the blood, the death – it was all a reminder of the horror of sin, the separation from God. Hebrews reminds us, “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” (Heb. 9:22)
You see the connection, right? The animals being sacrificed in the Old Testament pointed to the body of another…our Lord Jesus Christ. The blood sprinkled on the altar was merely pointing to another…our Lord Jesus Christ.
The city of Rotterdam, Holland had a dwelling called “The House of a Thousand Terrors.” In the 16th century King Philip II of Spain ruled Holland. He despised the Dutch. He sent troops in to kill and maim and torture. They went from house to house, slaughtering the citizens of the city. Then a young man had an idea. He killed a goat and then swept the blood under the door of the house. Soon the Spaniards came. But they saw the blood running under the door and said, “The work here is already done.” After the army withdrew, the people came out safe and saved by the blood of an animal.
John said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” (Jn. 1:29). Remember the verse earlier, “…without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” Do you see the Little One born to Mary and Joseph? Christ. Let’s put it all together. “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me…” (v. 5b)
The baby was born for this purpose, to be the sacrifice for our sins. His blood would turn away the anger of God. We live because He would die in our place. Miracle of miracles.
Verse 10. “And by that will we have been sacrificed through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” God’s doing. We have been made holy. This greatest gift we have received through Christ. Like Lucy we look at what’s over the hill. But everything is right in front of us. We have the best and everything necessary for life and salvation in Jesus Christ. It is all His doing. Not our will – not our might – but His. God’s doing.
Amen

December 18, 2024 Texts: Luke 19:41-44; John 11:30-36

Dear Friends in Christ,

What makes you cry? A person’s death? A sad movie or TV show? Watching something good happen to your children? A compliment that humbles you? Pain? When I was a child there wasn’t much that made me cry. What usually triggered it was losing. The Lord made me such a competitive person that I could not handle losing. It hurt. It was as if a part of me died.
I still do not like to lose, but it does not make weep. I’ve told you I didn’t cry when my mom died. But I have cried a lot since then. I am a more emotional person. Probably will be until the day I die. How about you, what gets your tears flowing?
Tonight, we finish our Advent sermon series on “Advent Answers to Hard Questions Hardly Anybody Is Asking.” The first week we focused on Jesus the baby; last week, Jesus the child; today, the very adult Jesus, the Man’s Man, and we ask . . .
“WHY WOULD JESUS EVER CRY?”
We sometimes can portray Jesus as this gentle, sweet man who liked to hold children in his lap. That is true, but it does not take away from His masculinity. Jesus had courage. Jesus wasn’t afraid to confront evil. He called the Pharisees a “brood of vipers.”
We all know the sayings, “Big boys don’t cry.” “Keep a stiff upper lip.” “Hang tough.” We know that Jesus cried. Probably more than the two references in Scripture. As he made his way into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday he wept. (Luke 19:41) He wept because the people had failed time and time again to heed the call to repentance and had continued in their woefully sinful ways.
Why did He cry? Because His heart was filled with sadness – like seeing someone you love go astray. Do you think He still cries when He sees people who call Him Lord, behave in a way that flies in the face of His teachings?
Jesus also wept when his good friend Lazarus died (John 11:35). It did not happen when He first heard the news, because He knew He had the power to raise him up, even after four days. Rather, what triggered the tears was when He saw His dear friend Mary of Bethany weeping in sorrow over the loss of her brother. His heart was filled with compassion and care. Seeing someone else cry, can also trigger our tears. Our compassion mechanism kicks in, and the crying begins.
Jesus – the Man’ Man. Nowhere in Scripture is His strength and courage more dramatic than when He was nailed to the cross. Beaten and battered and physically and verbally abused, He never once relinquished His single-minded resolve to fulfill His mission of redemption for the world. This would be the final and full payment for our sins.
In addition to these two instances, I wonder if Jesus didn’t cry when He looked down at his mother from the cross? Simeon had been right; a sword would pierce Mary’ heart (Luke 2:35), and it was happening now. Despite the pain and the imminent death, He was making sure His widowed mother would be cared for by his friend John.
It is hard to define a Man’s Man, but here are a few attributes. They love their wife and children. They are compassionate and care about people. They call evil for what it is when they see it in the world. They are selfless and willing to sacrifice their life for another. They are not afraid to cry.
This Advent, like every Advent, is about when heaven met earth. This time and season tells the miraculous story of God becoming flesh and blood through a baby named Jesus. This child’s obedience was to the will of His heavenly Father. This Son of God is our Savior and Lord. Whatever else may be going on in our lives, this story is paramount. Nothing else will matter when there appears the Lord in the final Advent.
It’s enough to make a person cry.
Amen.