Christmas Morning – 12/25/2024
Collect (III): Almighty God, you have given your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born [this day] of a pure virgin: Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom with you and the same Spirit be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.
Lessons
Isaiah 52:7-10 How beautiful the feet of those announcing peace
Psalm 98 Sing a new song
Hebrews 1:1-12 God has anointed (the Son) with righteousness
John 1:1-14 The WORD became flesh and lived among us
Give ear O heavens and I will speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth, for I will proclaim the Name of the Lord, and ascribe greatness to our God.
Welcome to Christmas morning, the Feast of the Nativity.
Last night we celebrated the Mass of the Angels and the Mass of the Shepherds from the Gospel of Luke. This morning we shift gears and are celebrating the Mass of the Word, taken from the Gospel according to Saint John:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God.”
This is a line that points us back to Genesis – The story of creation – doesn’t it?
“In the beginning, when God began to create heaven and earth, the earth being unformed and void; darkness covered the face of the deep. A WIND from God swept over the water, and God said, ‘Let there be light … and there was light!’” (Tanakh)
John is pointing us back to the story of Creation, and says, “The One who was there at the beginning is here with us now.” This is John’s Christmas story. This is John’s “Feliz Navidad!
My parents were born during the Great Depression, and so they approached life much differently than those of us who grew up in the Boomer years. They learned to make do with what they had, and found value in things we would call junk today. They would repair toasters and appliances, and if something couldn’t be saved, they took it apart and kept all those screws, bolts, lock-washers, and nuts in jars and cans and ratty boxes for “just in case.” My Dad was one of those people.
My Dad also had a heavy old wooden step ladder that was really a ladder in name only. The wood had shrunk so much over the years the hardware barely held it together. You’d open it up and it was old and rickety and had the structural integrity of a set of slinkies. But my Dad liked it, and he used it. It was an 8-footer, so he used it to get up onto the roof to clean out the gutters and drains which were always getting clogged in the fall (especially on the part of the house that had a flat roof – a really stupid design for this area).
When Dad got out the ladder, you knew things were about to “Get Real.”
He’d clamber up that ladder (which would wobble and shake like you were in the middle of an earthquake that was between 8 & 9 on the Richter scale) and pretty soon you’d look up and see clods of dirt, needles, leaves, pine cones, and all sorts of debris flying off the roof like a flock of birds when they catch sight of the cat sneaking up on them.
Christmas is kind of like my Dad’s old wooden step ladder. When you see it, you know things are about to get real. That’s the way John sees it (in the Gospel).
In the beginning, the universe was a mess, so God got real. God turned on the work lights, got things organized: Land, here. Water, there. Stars and planets in their courses, and so on. And finally, in the fullness of time, the human race, male and female and everything in between, we were created in the image of God; in the image of God created he them, created he US.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God, and nothing was created where the Word wasn’t involved, from the beginning, from the get-go,” says John.
What I find interesting is that John doesn’t care about Adam and Eve and the downfall of the human race; he isn’t interested in what went wrong. What God started in the beginning is what God continues to work on today, according to John.
“Let there be light,” were God’s first words in Genesis. “What came into being was life, and that life was the light of ALL the people,” says the Gospel.
That’s important: “All the people.”
Every now and then Barb will ask me to give her a hand. Sometimes she’ll be taking out her earrings in the bathroom and the little back will slip out of her fingers because they’re so small; it’s easy to lose your grip and drop them. But they’re also hard to find because they’re not only small, but sort of clear.
When that happens, I come a-running, and I always bring my 5-cell flashlight because, well, things are about to "get real." Nothing as precious and necessary as the tiny back to an earring is going to make a great escape – not if I have anything to say or do about it -- not on MY watch!
That means I usually have to get down on my hands and knees and sometimes even on my belly, shining the light parallel to the floor seeking that which has been lost. What I find amazing is that we vacuum and dust the floors every week, and yet when I get down there, there is so much I see we’ve missed. But what’s important isn’t the dust; it’s finding what we need to restore Barb’s jewelry to wholeness.
Reuniting the earring and the back-clip is the goal. The lint is immaterial, and we’ll deal with that the next time we vacuum and dust, but what’s important is the restoration, the reunion, the making whole.
Christmas is a celebration of the God who has brought out the rickety ladder, because there’s stuff that needs to be cleaned out and cleared away so that the home’s infrastructure will work properly. Jesus, the carpenter, the son of a carpenter is born and has come for a time such as this. Jesus is God’s way of saying, “Things are about to get real.”
John tells us, too, that Jesus is the light, and the purpose of the light is NOT to expose dirt and dust, but to find that which was lost. We are God’s great treasure, God’s jewels, God’s earrings, and Jesus has come to seek, find, and make us whole!
God does not shine the light on us to give us the third degree like some hard-boiled detective; God has delivered Jesus, to shine God’s glorious light into our hearts to reveal the treasures that lie within. That, as I say, is John’s Christmas story.
So, Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, and (in the words of my own ancestors) God Jul!
Amen
Sermon by the Rev. Keith Axberg (Ret.), delivered to St. Paul’s (Mount Vernon, WA). 12/25/2024
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