December 24, 2016, 5 pm service: Fr. Carey Stone



This sermon has no audio file attached.

 Christmas Eve A’16 5pm

24th December 2016
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
North Little Rock, Arkansas
The Rev. Carey Stone
 
Thanks for the pageant based on that familiar Christmas carol, “The 12 Days of Christmas.” It was cool to have the secret code explained, I especially liked finding out what that partridge was doing in that pear tree! 
 
But why would the message of the Christian faith ever have to be told in a secret code? Well, one idea is that it was written during a time of religious persecution, when you could get in big trouble just for trying to go to church. Whether that’s true we don’t know, but we do know that the world at the time it was written as it still is today can be a dangerous place. 
 
People don’t always follow God’s Ten Commandments do they? and they fail to love God and one another, this creates wars, famine, and prejudice – to put it bluntly people just weren’t acting right. What was God to do about all the problems down here on earth? God decided to come down and see what could be done. 
 
Now if you were God and your planet had become a dangerous, and violent place, where no one paid attention to your commandments, and you decided to go and straighten things out what kind of character would you go as? Maybe a superhero like Thor [pull out rubber mallet]; Maybe a Jedi knight with a light saber [extend saber]; whatever you came as you would try to be as powerful and scary as possible, right? That way people would be afraid of you and start acting right! 
 
But God didn’t want people to be afraid of them so God did just the opposite [pull out baby rattle] God chose to come to earth as a little innocent and totally harmless baby. For too many years people had heard about a God that they were scared to death of, a scary God of warfare, fire and destruction. The baby named Jesus had no hammers, swords, sabers, or scepters and if he had anything at all it might have been a baby rattle [shake rattle].  
 
By coming to earth as a baby God was trying to show us that we don’t’ have to be afraid, this God is a God of love and who simply asks that we make room for him in our hearts. That night there was no room for Jesus, Mary, or Joseph in the inn but what Jesus hopes for is that we will make room for him in our hearts.
 
 If there is then he will come and show us the God that is all love, and bigger than anything else we could ever be afraid of. When we make room in our hearts for Jesus we find it much easier to love God, our neighbors, and ourselves, which makes the world a whole lot better place to live. When you get home tonight put your baby rattle somewhere special where you can see it and be reminded of how far God was willing to come to show us his love and that he’s crazy about us and wants us to be able to come close to him, unafraid, and feel his hugs and hear his whispers of love inside our hearts. 
 
The Church would also like to give you a gift - a Christmas ornament to hang on your Christmas tree to remember that Holy Night so long ago and this holy night when we recalled God’s love that came to earth for us in the human form of a baby. Amen.