Sermon — December 24, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Do you know the Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter”? I didn’t grow up with it, but it’s grown on me over the years. This year, especially, it seems to say it all:
In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, Long ago.
“In the Bleak Midwinter,” we gather in the cold, the earth frozen “hard as iron,” the water “like a stone.” We gather at a moment of great darkness, and great light; of great suffering, and great hope; of painful sadness, and joyful anticipation.
We gather, in other words, in a moment that distils to its purest essence what it is to be human. This is it. This is all it’s ever been: sickness and death and compassion and hope, powerlessness and pain and rejoicing and love; the mixed-up emotional soundtrack to life. In ordinary times it’s fainter, with the volume dial turned halfway down, but this is it. This is what it is to be human beings: fragile, and beautiful, and loved.
And this is what it is God chose to be.
If there’s comfort, in any year, in the compassion of the Christmas story, it must be this year. At Christmas, we make the extraordinary claim that in Jesus, God became human. God looked down on our world, as beautiful and broken two thousand years ago as it is today, and God had a choice. God could wash everything away in another Flood and start afresh. God could give up, set an out-of-office reply to our prayers and fly away to another part of the multiverse. God could delegate, could send another prophet to tell us where we’d gone wrong and how to make things right.
But that’s not what God did.
God saw how often we say “no” to following the way of love, and invited one woman to say yes. God saw how powerless we are over the circumstances of our lives, and chose to walk among us, not as a mighty warrior or an influential legislator but as a newborn baby, the most helpless creature in the world. God saw the mess that human life’s become, and did the only thing a loving Parent could; God drew near to us, became one of us, became Emmanuel, “God with us.”
In Jesus of Nazareth, God walked among us. God knew the hunger and the fear of a newborn waking up for the hundredth time in a night. God knew the frustration of a toddler trying to stack his blocks too high. God knew the sorrow of losing a close friend, and the joy of eating and drinking together. God felt the deepest pain a human being could feel. God knew what it was to be betrayed; God knew what it was to die alone.
God knew, and God knows, what it is to be human, and in our deepest, darkest moments God sees us, and knows us, and loves us. And in the moments of our greatest pain, God himself is there with us, because the Christ whose birth we celebrate this Christmas is above all else the compassionate, loving God made flesh, bringing our pain up into God and God’s healing love down among us.
But this isn’t the whole story. Our God is not just a compassionate friend, a “Wonderful Counselor,” but a “Mighty God,” (Isaiah 9:6) a “Prince of Peace” sitting upon “the throne of David” “from this time onward and forevermore,” whose “authority shall grow continually,” and in whose kingdom “there shall be endless peace.” (Isaiah 9:9, 9:7)
God, in other words, didn’t just come among us to feel our pain, and then to return to heaven with a bit more empathy for the human condition. God came to change the world. In Jesus, God comes as a leader, a ruler, a “Prince.” God comes to us and starts a movement, and invites us to follow. God teaches us to love one another. God empowers us to love one another. And then God asks us to love one another, with Jesus himself leading the way.
The one line of “In the Bleak Midwinter” that gets me every time is this: “Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. “Our God, heaven cannot hold him.” God’s love is so great that it spills out of heaven and splashes onto earth. God’s Holy Spirit flows out and fills us all, fills us to the brim and keeps pouring, so that God’s love overflows out of us and we love one another. Sometimes we don’t even know that it’s happening. Sometimes we don’t believe that it is. Sometimes we look at the world and we ask, “Where is God?”
And the answer is: Right here! Right now. Yes, God is up “in heaven” empathizing with us, and loving us. But “heaven cannot hold him.” God is not locked away in heaven. God is here, now, with us, acting in us and through us and for us, the hidden force in every act of human love. In every nurse’s gentle touch, in every neighbor’s grocery run, in every single sacrifice we make for one another, the Holy Spirit flows through us, the light of Christ that shines brightly on this holy night shines through us.
So look for that light. Carry that light. Spread that light this Christmas season and forevermore. “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” (Titus 2:11) Amen.