God Dwells in You

Sermon for Christmas Eve 2022
Luke 2:1-14

This is a night of mystery.  For the smaller among us, the mystery may be about how a large man in a red suit manages to haul a bag of toys up and down several billion chimneys on one night.  I used to wrestle with that one, as I’ll bet many of you did.  But I’ll tell you: Tonight, the mystery is far more grand.

Let’s start where we left off last Sunday.  Mary and Joseph were separately receiving the news that she would bear a child from the Holy Spirit, a child who would be called “Son of God” and who would reign in glory forever.  These two nobodies heard heavenly messengers coming directly to them, the voice of God assuring them, “I am with you.”  “I am with you always,” Jesus says at the end of Matthew’s Gospel.  God is with you – no matter what.

That’s pretty darned good news – that we are not alone.  In everything we’re bearing on this cold, dark night, we are not alone.  God will never leave us, standing with us even to the end of the age.  That would be good news enough.

But wait; there’s more.  As good as that news is, God then takes it up a notch.  And I think that’s what we’re here to celebrate on this night of mystery.

I want to tell you about two teenaged boys.  The first is someone you’ve heard of: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose music we’re reveling in tonight.  So far, we’ve heard two movements of Mozart’s Missa Brevis in G Major.  And there’s an anthem and two more movements of this glorious mass setting still to come.   

For those of us who aren’t musicians, Mozart’s music is some of the most deeply satisfying there is.  Maybe we can’t tell you why, but we know every note is right – simply right.  But for a true musician, it must be stunning to get to bring that music to life. 

Remember the movie Amadeus from the 1980s?  Mozart’s competitor, the insanely jealous court composer Antonio Salieri, is looking at sheets of Mozart’s compositions, brought to him by Mozart’s wife.  She asks Salieri to be careful, because these are the originals of these works.  Salieri stops short and asks, “Originals?”  “Yes,” she says, “[my husband] doesn’t make copies.”  As Salieri looks over the sheets of music, he realizes something he can’t believe.  Salieri says, “These were first and only drafts of music.  They showed no corrections of any kind – not one.  [Mozart] had simply written down music already finished in his head – page after page of it, as if he were just taking dictation.  And music finished as no music is ever finished.  Misplace one note, and there would be diminishment.  Misplace one phrase, and the structure would fall.  It was clear to me,” Salieri says: This was “the very voice of God.”¹

Now, the other day, Mark Burroughs from our choir came by my office, and the conversation turned to Mozart and the music we’d be offering here tonight.  “You know,” Mark said – “that mass we’re singing on Christmas Eve – Mozart wrote it when he was 13.”  Thirteen.  When I was 13, I was lucky to write a coherent sentence.  When Mozart was 13, he was writing in the voice of God.

Here’s the second teenaged boy I want to tell you about, someone many of you already know: John Kirmer.  John is an acolyte here – in fact, he served at the 8 p.m. service tonight.  You’ve seen him leading processions and serving at the altar.  What you wouldn’t know from that is John is also a cancer survivor.  In March of 2021, when he was 13, John was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, bone cancer in his upper leg.  What the family thought was a soccer injury turned out to be a tumor instead.  John ended up losing much of his upper leg, enduring a procedure called rotationplasty that took his lower leg, turned it backwards, and made his ankle into a knee.  Now he wears a prosthetic, which he loves to take off and wave around to freak people out.

Earlier this week, at our Vestry meeting, the Vestry members were sharing ways in which they’d seen Jesus alive and at work among us over this past year.  John’s father, Scott Kirmer, shared the miracle and wonder of being supported and loved by this congregation as the Kirmer family has endured all that they’ve endured.  Scott noted that, for all of us, there are times along our way when we wonder whether God is really there at all, when we go through those long and sleepless dark nights of our souls, when the pain – especially the pain of those we love – is nearly more than we can bear.  But then, Scott said, there’s the rest of the story – how he and his family have been loved and supported by this church family and countless other friends; how he and his family have felt the very love of God healing John, and all of them, from cancer’s crushing blow. 

That healing, happening on so many levels, even received an outside affirmation on St. Andrew’s Sunday, as our bishop, Diane Jardine Bruce, stood here to lay hands on John in the sacrament of confirmation.  Bishop Diane had been sort of interviewing the confirmands as they came up, and she began to engage with John that same way.  But then she stopped, and went silent for a minute, and finally said, “Whoa.  Still waters run deep in this one.”  As Scott told the Vestry Tuesday night:  “When your life comes to a point when you begin to doubt whether God is with you … well, I’ve been there,” he said, “and I can tell you:  He is really here.  It’s true.”

The presence of the living God can seem too good to be true.  Bring to mind the Gospel reading for tonight.  Many of us have heard this Christmas story so many times that it becomes the stuff of nostalgia, Linus’ lines in the Charlie Brown Christmas special – so familiar that it loses its punch.  But try to hear the punchline anew in this divine tale. 

Mary and Joseph are pretty low on the social scale.  He’s a tradesman; she’s an unmarried pregnant teenager.  The government has forced them, and all the other nobodies, to travel cross-country to their hometowns so the government can be sure it’s taxing them enough.  But Mary is about to deliver, and she and Joseph are lucky to have found a barn for her to lie down in before the baby came.  There, in the muck of the stalls, they find some rags to wrap around the baby, and they put him in a dirty feedbox. 

Meanwhile, outside town, some shepherds are bedding down for the night when a divine messenger appears, shining in nothing less than God’s own glory.  “Terrified” doesn’t even begin to describe their panic.  But the angel tells them, “Do not be afraid, for see – I’m bringing you good news of great joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10).  And what’s the news?  Nothing less than what God’s people have been longing for – the anointed king, the messiah, the one who would restore God’s kingdom and kick Caesar back across the Mediterranean.  Yes, God’s king has been born, “and this will be a sign for you,” the angel says.  “OK, what’s the sign?” ask the shepherds.  Tablets from the mountaintop?  A golden crown?  A sword in the stone?  What sign of the hand of God should we look for?  And the angel hits the punchline: “Look for a screaming baby wrapped in rags and lying in the slop.”  You almost expect a rim shot on the divine drum set.

As the angel, as and Mtr. Rita, said last week, God is with us always.  But that’s not all.  God is one of us.  God is in us.  God is in you.  God sings through the pen of a 13-year-old who could see the music of the angels in his head.  God stands on the legs of a 15-year-old who refuses to let cancer keep him down.  God embraces us with the arms of the Body of Christ in this good place, bearing us up at precisely the time when we fear we will fall.  If you came here tonight looking to unlock the mystery of Christmas, here you go:  God is not just with us, as stunning as that is.  God inhabits our lives, and blesses the world through our gifts, and empowers us to take steps we never dreamed we could take.  Our lives are days of miracle and wonder, for we are blessed to be, and to share, the heart and hands of God.

1.      “Amadeus remastered HD – Salieri, in awe of Mozart’s music genius, realizes he can’t compete.” Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpzhkMBm498. Accessed Dec. 22, 2022.