Christmas 1C”24
29 December 2024
John 1.1-18
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
North Little Rock, Arkansas
The Rev. Carey Stone <+>
And his name shall be called, Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Amen.
Well – I’ll ask the question that you have probably already been asked several times by now- ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’ That is the question we will continue to answer over the next several days as our overstuffed selves try to take advantage of all those after-Christmas sales.
Each Christmas, even at its best doesn’t ever seem to quite deliver all that it promises. The old familiar family dysfunction has confronted us once again and we are reminded why we can only tolerate some of our extended family members once or twice a year. The overly rich food sends us searching for the Alka-Seltzer of the Gas X! Even when we get the special gift, we thought we had to have, we find that it doesn’t solve our darkest dilemmas or answer our deepest questions.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas with all of its traditions. I’m always glad when I get the present I wanted so badly and I love to come to church on Christmas Eve to hear and sing about The Greatest Story once again. But after all the revelry and the reverent refrains sung on Christmas Night, here we are on the first Sunday after Christmas one of the Sundays of the year that has the lowest attendance. What does it mean that we are all here today? I mean really, why did we get out of bed and come to Church this morning?
What it tells me is that somewhere deep down inside each of us there’s an awareness that it is the warmth of the Light of the World that we really need, it’s God’s presence that we need more than any present from underneath the Christmas tree. And there just aren’t enough Turkeys and Hams in North Little Rock to fill the spiritual hunger that lies at the depths of our souls where that Voice dwells that refuses to be silent, and continues to call us.
In a world where so much seems to be so terribly wrong we are drawn to come together to hear the story that the Word – Emmanuel – God with us has been made flesh and has lived where we live. Another set of cold stone tablets with laws written on them just wouldn’t do – we would just break those too. A leather-bound book with gold edges wouldn’t do either, nor would cold concepts that one local religious group calls “truth principles that work for you” – they just won’t do! What we have in the story of the incarnation is that nothing less than God’s Son would do. A person not text – a living Word that demonstrated the ways of God and revealed the face of God in human flesh as a vulnerable little child. Jesus, the Son of God, came as a child in order that we might become children of God.
It is a relationship that we are offered not rules or laws or concepts; as St. Paul wrote to the Galatians: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman…so that we might receive adoption as children.”
Now being dependent children doesn’t hold much appeal for us independent Americans. Dependency, in its usual use, doesn’t sound very attractive. In fact, we see adults who are dependent on others or on drugs and alcohol as people that are to be pitied. The former Archbishop Rowan Williams noted recently, “We think of dependency as something passive and less than free” but he suggests a different view, “If we think of being dependent on the air we breath, or the food we eat things look different. Even more if we remind ourselves that we depend on our parents for learning how to speak and act and most of all how to love. There is a dependence about simply receiving what we need to live; there is a dependence that is about how to learn and grow.” It is this kind of dependency that we are made for, and it is just this kind of dependency that will get us through all the dark places and the tough times that we will face during our lifetimes.
The great American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a very intimate experience with the darkness this would can dish out. At the very beginning of the Civil War his wife Fanny died tragically in a library fire and a couple of years later his young son who was a lieutenant in the army of the Potomac, was wounded and become permanently disabled. He leaned heavily on his God in those days and wrote these words that were found in the original version of the Christmas hymn, “I heard the bells on Christmas Day”:
And in despair I bowed my head;
There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”
St. John writes in that great prologue to the fourth gospel: What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light to all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
Life! Real life! This Life is to be found in the embrace of the approachable God, who approached humanity first as a dependent child, who would not come barking orders but with the soft cries of a baby.
It was no rule book that enabled Longfellow to keep going and not to give up, it was a relationship with a loving and compassionate God – a God who came to live among us to experience the suffering and pain of human life.
As Longfellow was able to draw on his relationship with God through prayer, and worship, he was able to choose hope over despair, and instead of giving into the darkness, wrote a hymn of praise that continues to inspire us today! That relationship is what we are all hungering for and it can be found as we are dependent (in the best sense of the word) upon a God called “Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace;” who was willing to leave a heavenly throne for a cattle trough in order to reach us all with his saving embrace. Amen.
1 Williams, Rowan Christmas Sermon to the Anglican Communion 2009