Christmas Day (B) 2011

+ In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti + Amen.

Text: John 1:14
Theme: God Receives Humanity

Dear friends in Christ Jesus,

Not everything has a history. When God brings newness He doesn’t necessary recast, rework, restore or recover existing things. The news of a child to be born in Bethlehem has a long history but on that first Christmas God in human form did not. At Christmas we celebrate an unprecedented event- an event without a history. And it is concealed in one of the most common of occurrences. We celebrate God crossing into the category of His creation, the Immortal One assuming a mortal frame. It happens in the familiar manner of human birth. God breaks new ground using the same means He instituted for His creation.

“The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us…full of grace and truth.”1 This is the truth we celebrate today. In what manner did He come to dwell among us and what does it mean? We are shielded from His majesty but allowed to behold His humility. He sleeps. He cries. He eats. He grows. Yet He possesses the divinity of the Father. He would sometimes hide Himself from the Jews, but He commanded demons. He rebuked Pharisees but embraced children. He slept on a fishing vessel but subdued the raging waves. He possesses all the qualities of the human nature and all the Deity of the Godhead.

This union was necessary to rescue those who were condemned to suffer the final consequences of their fallen humanity. All that is dark, and sinister, false and selfish in your life accumulates on the human side of the equation. That is, until Jesus in His body gives access to the payment for sins, we are doomed to perish under the weight of divine wrath. God provides no other way. Our repentance and remorse is to be directed nowhere else because there is no other means. Neither should we think God has something to prove- that He needs to provide something greater than a manger, a cross and empty tomb- something more dramatic and unmistakably heavenly before we turn to Him.

We need to mature out of the idea that if God regularly exercised His might in public displays of power there would be more regular and consistent believers. That view of conversion has a long and failed track record. Think of Noah’s flood, the Exodus and all of the miracles of Christ. People can be motivated by fear, even awe, but apart from the Holy Spirit revealing to the sinners Christ’s compassion that doesn’t translate into faith. Outward obedience can be maintained by constant threat, even promise of reward. But then the very definition of faith would also be altered. Trust would no longer be a gift of the Holy Spirit with the promise of Christ as its object. It would be an act of the will that has been over-powered by sensory evidence. Jesus said to Thomas after His resurrection that seeing is believing. But blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

The Saviour was born among us meekly, unpretentious and underprivileged. This was offensive even to well-meaning Jews who looked for a royal son of David to re-institute the glory of Solomon. But within His human frame God was dwelling among humanity. This was all to our advantage as one of the Church fathers has said, “By no means did He diminish His own nature by His condescension, but He raised us, who had always sat in disgrace and darkness, to unspeakable glory.”2 He is the reconciler of relationships, the anchor in stormy seas, and the only comfort in death.

We cannot turn back time. The truth of Christmas doesn’t live among us as a memory. The angels are not stage props that are stored away for another year. The Child of Bethlehem is not kept as an infant in perpetuity. Faith is not sustained by an annual remembrance of the nativity no matter how tightly the sentiment is held. Faith is nurtured as the words of Christ regularly reach our ears and His body and blood regularly reach our lips. When your heart sighs in repentance and is lifted by the sound of forgiveness you are breathing the air of your baptism. When you dine at His altar you ingest the food of immortality. In these seemingly common and mundane actions you interface with the uncommon King, the Saviour, the Resurrected One.

The truth that Christ is both God and man is a paradox that lies right at the heart of Christianity. It is the very mystery of Christmas. He hungered in the desert but He fed the masses. He descended into the pits of hell but He is the Dayspring from on high. He battled Satan one-on-one but He has countless legions of angels at His command. He is the Master of all powers and principalities but He stooped to wash His disciples’ feet. “He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief…stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.”3 Yet He is “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”4 His greatest glory was to wear a crown of thorns and bear the scars of those nails even in His resurrected body. He sweat drops of blood at the Mount of Olives but He will wipe away every tear from our eyes in the heavenly Zion.

This paradox informs every aspect of Christian living. The common, ordinary and even tedious routines of life are honoured by the sacred countenance of God when they are done in service to His name. Our vocations as husbands, wives, parents, children, employers and employees, students and retirees are sanctified by His Spirit. We are consecrated, set apart, to serve others in a self-defeating world. Our struggling, decaying, ageing humanity lives- and lives joyously- in the knowledge that it has been clothed with the righteousness of Christ and will be restored to His immortality. In short, what we are is being superseded by what we are becoming in Him. Bethlehem is the beginning of the journey but the heavenly Jerusalem is the place of permanent residence. “In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.”5 Not everything has a previous history but in Christ it has a permanent future.
Glory to God in the Highest! Amen.




+ In nomine Jesu +

Nativity of Our Lord
Christmas Day
25 December 2011
Reverend Darrin L. Kohrt

1 John 1:14
2 Chrysostom
3 Isaiah 53:3-4
4 Isaiah 9:6
5 John 1:4