December 24, 2012 | 8:30 and 11:00 p.m. | Service of Lessons and Carols

A Christmas Eve Sermon

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

This is a wonderful season in the life of this community, this church: a season of lights and candles; of carols and pageants, as we had the children of the church at 4:00 dressed up in their costumes and giving their gift to the church of telling us the story of Christmas. Families reunited at home, gathered for Christmas, coming to church together and getting ready for the season of giving and receiving gifts.

A friend sent me this heartwarming seasonal story about a man who worked for the post office. His job was to process all the mail that had illegible or incomplete addresses. One day a letter came addressed in shaky handwriting to God, with no actual address for God, but it did have a return address. He decided to open it to see what it was about. The letter read,

Dear God, I’m an eighty-three-year-old widow living on a very small pension. Yesterday someone stole my purse. It had a hundred dollars in it, which was all the money I had until my next pension payment. Next Sunday is Christmas, and I have invited two of my friends over for dinner. Without that money I have nothing to buy food with. I have no family to turn to, and you are my only hope. Can you please help me? Sincerely, Edna

The postal worker was touched. He showed the letter to all the other workers. Each one dug into his or her wallet and came up with a few dollars. By the time he had made the rounds, he had collected $96, which he put into an envelope and sent to the woman, addressing the sender as God. The rest of the day all the workers felt a warm glow, thinking of Edna and the dinner she would be able to share with her friends.

Christmas came and went. A few days later, another letter arrived from Edna to God. All the workers gathered round while the letter was opened. It read,

Dear God, How can I ever thank you enough for what you did for me? Because of your gift of love, I was able to fix a glorious dinner for my friends. We had a very nice day, and I told my friends of your wonderful gift. By the way, there was four dollars missing. I think it might have been those thieving sods at the post office. Sincerely, Edna

Shameless, but I couldn’t resist it.

One gift I could do without in this season is the gift that some radio stations make to us. That gift is called “All Christmas Music, All the Time.” It really seems that a sane person can only listen to “Feliz Navidad” so many times before taking a hammer to the appliance (or changing stations). One of the things that you discover when you listen to all Christmas music all the time is this recurring theme that comes up in much Christmas holiday music—the theme of home: “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” “Home for the Holidays.” We see it in the advertising that surrounds the season as well: idyllic homes, pictures of the family reunited round the dinner table, gathered in front of roaring fires. And it strikes me that there is an irony in this recurring theme of home, because when you read the Christmas story, as we are hearing tonight, you realize that in the first Christmas story nobody is home.

Travel-weary Joseph and heavily pregnant Mary journey away from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem, the ancestral town of Joseph. Indeed, not only are they not at home, but they don’t even find proper shelter for the birth of the child.

The angels aren’t home either. They’re on the move from heaven—which I guess is their home—to earth to say and sing of the great good news, to share it with the shepherds that they might themselves share it with others; the angels are journeying, coming to earth, to what the theologian Philip Yancy calls “the visited planet.”

Shepherds—they’re not at home. Of course they’re not even in their usual place in the fields, ultimately. They, too, have to make the journey from the fields where they are keeping their sheep to find the baby in the stable after being scared out of their wits by this encounter with the heavenly messengers; they take their own journey.

And, of course, in Matthew’s Gospel, those mysterious magi, the wise men—they’re on the road away from home, being led by the star to find the new promised king. T. S. Eliot imagines these magi as grumbling in just the worst time of year for a journey and such a long journey, the ways deep, the weather sharp, the very dead of winter. Indeed we might say that the magi’s grumbling in that poem “The Journey of the Magi” could be true of any of those involved in the story except perhaps Herod and his advisors. They were very much at home.

And I believe that all this activity and movement and journeying is occasioned because not even God is at home on Christmas. God, maker of heaven and earth, creator of all that is, God whose nature and name is love is also on a journey at Christmas. God is journeying on Christmas to where you and I are. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. That’s a description of Christmas in John’s Gospel. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. In the original language of the New Testament that phrase “dwelt among us” means that God pitched God’s own tent with ours. God came into our community at Christmas. God crept in beside us.

You see love, love came down at Christmas. That at its heart is what we are celebrating amidst the color and the candles and the gifts and all these joyous things of this season; that is what we are giving thanks for, that love came down at Christmas. And God took on what it is to be human, to be like you or me, in the form of a little baby born in, of all places, an animal shed, laid in the feeding trough for his bed in a far-flung marginal part of the known world, far away from the centers of power. And now nothing can ever be the same.

U. A. Fanthorpe, great English poet, has a lovely poem about Christmas. It’s called BC AD. It begins like this, “This was the moment when Before turned into After.” Nothing could be the same. Before has turned into after. God has journeyed to us and crept in beside us. And the baby in the manger has become the promised reign of God in our own life—our own lives in all of their promise and achievement, in all the hurt and brokenness that we know in our humanity. The God of love has crept in beside us, bringing healing and hope to you, God’s own people.

So let us again ourselves take up the journey, the journey to Bethlehem, and join those U.A. Fanthorpe’s poem describes this way: “This was the moment when a few farm workers and three members of an obscure Persian sect walked haphazard by starlight straight into the kingdom of heaven.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.