Luke 2:1-14
This is a night of crazy love. In the midst of everything else you have on
your heart and mind tonight, I’d ask you to stop for a moment and consider whether
this makes any sense at all: In a
particular historical moment, specifically while some guy named Quirinius was
governor of Syria, the Creator and Sovereign of the Universe decided it was a
good idea to experience being human in order to save humans from the powers of
sin and death that beat us down. And not
just that: The Creator and Sovereign of
the Universe decided the best way to do that was to be born to an unwed teenaged
peasant oppressed by a foreign empire, in a day when medical infrastructure
looked like pieces of cloth wrapped around a baby screaming in a barn. This is how the Creator and Sovereign of the
Universe decided to experience human life in order to save us: from the bottom
up, from the inside out. The theologians
call it the doctrine of the Incarnation, but I call it crazy love – love that
bends our minds even as we come here tonight to bend our knees.
I’ve had some glimpses of crazy love in my
life. Mostly, they’ve come from my
parents. My parents are older now and
slowing down, but what I remember is love they drew from a well whose depth I
can only hope to fathom. My mother
raised four kids, working as a teacher through several of those years; yet what
I remember is her presence – reading to me every night, playing games, taking
me to the library or the zoo, encouraging me to ask questions and explore. My father was a university dean, doing the
thankless work of administration with such taxing honor that his colleagues
gave him the nickname, “Spike the Just.”
Yet, I remember him being there with me when he came home from work,
playing catch in the backyard. On a wall
in my house is a fading photo from about 1970 of my father and me sitting at a
campfire we’d built on a cold Colorado morning, warming our hands in mirror
image and grinning the same grin that says, life doesn’t get any better than
this. In every way imaginable, my
parents have given themselves to the four of us kids, then and now. Being their child has been like living the
last scene of the movie It’s a Wonderful
Life. And when I’ve told them how I
feel incapable of ever paying them back, they say, of course, that’s not the
point. The point is to pay it forward
with my kids … and with the world around me.
It’s crazy love, accounting that only makes sense in God’s economy.
Here’s what I’ve learned from my parents: Their unconditional love is a glimpse, a
sacrament, of God’s unconditional
love. And what that means, as hard as it
is to say it out loud, is that I hold immeasurable value in God’s eyes. There is nothing and no one that matters more
to God; nothing and no one that stirs God’s heart more deeply. And the same is true for you. I don’t care who you are, or what you’ve done,
or what you haven’t done – it is the
truth, the fundamental truth of this
holy night, that God loves you immeasurably.
Like any parent, God’s disappointed in
you sometimes. God’s heart may even ache
tonight, wishing to see you coming down the road back home. But God never gives up on you. And you never cease being worth all that
crazy love.
And you know, the same is true about the
person sitting next to you. And the
person sitting down the pew. And the
person sitting on the couch back home. And
the person sitting at an empty bar, with no one to go home to. And the person sleeping on the street,
freezing tonight. And the person lying
in an Alzheimer’s unit. And the person running
away from the cops. And the person crying
because she can’t afford to buy her daughter a Christmas present. God loves each of them a million times more
than my parents love me.
That is the gift of Christmas: love you
can never earn, and love you can never repay.
All you can do is love someone else in return.
Deep down, we all know that. But what does that love look like?
Our cherished images of Christmas tell us
the story, like Christmas cards hanging on the doorways of our lives. Think about A Christmas Carol, with Ebenezer Scrooge seeing the emptiness of
his life, receiving the gift of a second chance, and finally sending the prize
turkey to Tiny Tim and his family. Think
about It’s a Wonderful Life, with the
self-sacrificing George Bailey wanting to kill himself for a life insurance payout
but finding his friends rallying around, and showering him with love, and showing him he’s the richest man in town. You know the story, told a hundred ways: Life shortchanges you, or you shortchange others. You feel your heart held captive, and you start
to lose hope. You can’t even see what
redemption looks like, and you can’t imagine it coming to you. And then God acts.
In the great, cosmic story of redemption
we hear tonight, God announces divine action through angels visiting shepherds,
with the whole host of the heavenly army turned into a glee club, stepping
aside from the battle against sin and death to let a tiny child do the work
instead. And in that child, God comes as
the true emperor, the one to show that Caesar is a cheap fraud, the one to free
us from the power of evil and sin and death, vanquishing those powers at Easter. But God does it in the last way anyone would’ve
guessed. In the words of the ancient
carol we’ll hear in a few minutes, “This little babe so few days old is come to
rifle Satan’s fold; / All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself
for cold [doth] shake.” In the deep
mystery of love, God sends a little child to do a conqueror’s work.
Though it’s crazy, it’s a pattern of love
we can trust and from which God calls us to act. Love is what changes the world. Love is what frees us from the disfigured
shadows of ourselves that life can turn us into. Love is what changes the heart of Ebenezer
Scrooge, and warms the heart of George Bailey, to live into the fullness of
whom God’s created them to be. Love
comes from people we don’t expect to see, in places we don’t expect to find
them, to fill holes in our hearts we never knew were there.
That happened to me at the Free Store this
Wednesday – and I imagine most of us who went there to give out clothes and talk
to clients could tell our own story of unexpected love that came down that
day. One of our volunteers introduced me
to a client. The man looked at me and
asked, “Can I trust you?” And I said, “Well,
if you can’t, I might as well just go on home now because trust is pretty much
all I’ve got to work with.” So the
client replied, “I have a little feedback about this project, for you to
consider for next year.” And I thought,
“OK, what did we do wrong…?” But the man
said, “Everything here is great, and I really appreciate it. But next year, put out an offering box so we can help out, so we can give
back.” Then he handed me six dollars and
said, “Here. Use this as your first donation
toward next year.”
That is God’s crazy love, a divine mystery
we come to know best through flesh and bones.
Through people no better than ourselves.
Through the divine mystery of Incarnation: that the very essence of
God’s being, love itself, comes to dwell among us and within us, stirring our
stiff hearts to remember, form deep within our divine DNA, that we were created
by Love for love. In fact, the
instrument of choice for accomplishing God’s grandest and most eternal purpose
is … you. Just as God comes into the
world as a baby shivering in the cold, so God comes to you tonight, aching to
be born anew. And in your mundane flesh
and bones, in your sometimes cold, cold heart, the Word takes flesh and dwells
among us once again.
My parents were right. I can never pay them back. I can never return the love they’ve given
me. But I can take that love and show up
for someone else, thousands of times over.
None of us can fix the world, but we can love it, one child of God at a
time. We can show up when someone is
sick. We can stay in relationship when
our selfish hearts tell us to run. We
can show our children what it looks like to love, no matter what. We can talk to a stranger who lives on the
street. We can get to know someone God brings
into this church. We can follow God’s
lead, on this holy night, and love the world precisely as we find it, one
broken person at a time. As crazy as it
sounds, that’s how Love saves the world today.
God wants nothing more than to share your life, and shape your heart,
and take your flesh, and be born tonight, in you.
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