Series A                                                   Christmas Eve       December 24, 2010                                                                          

Luke 2:1-20

“God’s ‘Rhema’ Born This Night”

Once upon a time a little girl named Sara, told her mother that she just hated Christmas.  Of course her mother asked her why in the world she would say such a thing.  Sara responded that Christmas meant too much work for everyone to get ready for it.  She didn’t like that she had to spend so much time helping to decorate the house when she would rather be playing.  She didn’t like that she had to help her mother with the Christmas cookies, and all the extra cooking, and then having all those dishes to wash afterwards when she would rather be watching T.V.  And she didn’t like that all the radio stations stopped playing her favorite songs and replaced them with Christmas music and carols.  And the weather was always so lousy – if it wasn’t raining, it was snowing or sleeting, and the lousy weather caused her younger brothers to track in all this slop and muck from outside which mom made her help clean up because the house always had to look nice because you never knew who might stop by.   And she also didn’t like the fact that everyone got so tired and short tempered at Christmas time because of all the extra work required of them in getting ready .. (not that she ever lost her temper).  And she also complained that her parents drug her off to so many extra church services and other events at the church at this time of year.  Isn’t just going once a week on Sunday morning enough?  But there is Hanging of the Greens, the Christmas Bazaar, the Lessons and Carols Service, Rehearsals for the Christmas Eve services, and then the two services of Christmas Eve.  She had to spend more time at church than she spent playing her video games.  Included in this rant about Christmas she asked her mother why Jesus had to come at Christmas time anyway.  Couldn’t he just as easily have chosen to come at a time of the year when everyone and everything was much more relaxed and casual.  When people had more time to worship and pray rather than running around here and there just to get things done?

It was at that moment when her mother broke into Sara’s rant and reminded her that Jesus is the Christ child whose birth we are celebrating, and Christmas means Christ Mass.  Christmas is the celebration of our Lord’s birthday.

Oh, said

Sara, thoughtfully contemplating this fact.  After a few minutes she finally asked, “Then why did he have to choose the holidays to be born.  At that her mother smiled and admitted that that it was a very good question!

When the Angel told the shepherds of the birth of Christ, she spoke of “good news of a great joy which will come to all people”.  But joy can be very different for different people.  For people who are hungry, a great joy would be getting to eat a wonderful Christmas banquet.  For families with loved ones who are dying, a great joy would be a miraculous healing.  For people living in a desert, a great joy would be an extended cool rain.  For someone who has been unemployed for a long time, a great joy would be finding a job with good pay and health benefits.  For someone who loves skiing, a great joy would be a cold winter with lots of snow.  For a person on life support awaiting an organ transplant, a great joy would be a successful organ transplant surgery.

You get the idea.  For many people a “great joy” can be a very different experience or gift.  But in every case, JOY brings great change from what has been.  The hungry are fed, the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, the dead are raise.  In each case they have something they didn’t have before and that is the cause of the joy.

The joy these angels speak of to those shepherds and us is great because this joy is to all people, and is a gift from God that we didn’t have before.  This gift brings great joy because it brings God’s peace, love, grace, forgiveness, salvation:  and everyone needs these things.

These lowly shepherds understood immediately what the angels had promise.  Our English translations record they said, “let us go see this ‘thing’”.  But in the Greek it is not a “thing” they are going to see it is the “rhema”!  It means “word”! 

The Gospel of John tells us Jesus is “the word”

“The word was with God — the Word became flesh and lived among us”

The response of the shepherds is the response that should characterize every Christian: to go and see.  The life of every believer should be to go to where Christ is present — to worship where, in Word and Sacrament, Jesus becomes present to every one who believes.  And then we should each return from worship to our homes glorifying and praising God and telling others of this good news of great joy that has come to all people.  Tonight is but the first step, we gather to be where He is present, and it should characterize our lives every week of every year.

And then there is Mary’s response.  We are told:

“Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”

“Rhema” is used for what Mary treasured also.  The use of “pondered” implies that she didn’t necessarily understand everything she heard, but understanding was not necessary for the joy of those words to fill her life.  For she, more than any other, knew from whom this child came even though she may not have fully understood his future mission and ministry expected of him from God the Father.

And one final point and it is found in God choosing unworthy shepherds to be the first witnesses of His “rhema”.  Shepherds were considered unclean by all Jewish standards, so they were not allowed in a synagogue.   They were considered outlaws, so they were not allowed to be witnesses in a court of law.  They would spend months at a time with their sheep out in the fields where there were no showers or bathrooms, so you know how they must have smelled, let alone how filthy and germ ridden they must also have been.  They would be the last group of people you would want around at a birth.  Precisely because they should not have been there is why this is such good news for us!

They weren’t there because they were worthy, but because they were invited by God.  And they responded to that invitation.  And that is the good news for us this holy night.  We are not here because we are worthy either, but because we also have received God’s divine invitation.  We don’t deserve this good news, but God bestows it upon all who respond to His invitation.  And then we depart forever changed because faith has been sown in our hearts.  And that faith will grow in good soil that is regularly nourished with the light of God’s presence, watered in the sacraments, and fed with God’s “rhema”.

Because of this night, there is:

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

And that is why we sing of a great joy that has now come to us all!  For the present we open from God this night places in our lives His “rhema”, and that word gives God’s peace, love, grace, forgiveness, and salvation to all who believe!

AMEN