God With Us

God With Us

A Christmas Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 24, 2017

Scripture: Luke 2:1-20; Mark 7:25-30

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

As some of you know I serve on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. That’s the committee that deals with authorization for ministry in the UCC, at least in this part of the country. One of the primary things that committee does is authorize candidates for ordination in the UCC. At our December meeting we interviewed a candidate for ordination, a really wonderful candidate by the way, not that that matters for my purposes this evening. In the course of her interview our candidate said she loves the story of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman, a story that appears in both Mark and Matthew. Mark 7:25-30, Matthew 15:21-28. In that story Jesus learns. He first rejects the request of a Gentile woman that he heal her daughter of an evil spirit. In Mark’s version he says to her “First let the children eat all they want...for it is not right to take the children’s food and toss it to their dogs.” Mark 7:27 Sounds like he’s calling this woman and her daughter dogs just because they aren’t Jewish. Ouch! Many of us I think find it hard to believe that our Jesus would ever say such a thing to anyone, but there it is, in two of the Gospels. The woman replies to him “Yes, Lord,...but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Not perhaps how we’d reply to him, but it is how this woman replies in this story. Whereupon Jesus seems to realize his error and cures the woman’s daughter of her evil spirit.

When our ordination candidate mentioned this story one of the committee members started asking her questions like: Is Jesus human or divine? Is he like us or different from us? If he is different from us, is he more different from us than we are from one another? Those are perfectly appropriate questions for an ordination interview, and our candidate handled them well enough. Yet it occurred to me that she could have answered them all with just one word: Both. Is Jesus human or divine? Both. Is Jesus like us or different from us? Both. With the ancient Christian tradition we confess: Jesus is both fully human and fully God.

That’s why tonight we don’t just celebrate the birth of a human child. We do celebrate the birth of a human child of course. Jesus comes to us as a human baby not noticeably different from other human babies. He is a particular human baby of course. He is a boy. He is a Jew. He is born in what we now call ancient Judea. He has a human mother like we all do, or did. He also has a human father, although both Matthew and Luke say he doesn’t have a biological human father. He is fully human.

He is also fully divine. That’s what we can learn from so many of the things in Matthew’s and Luke’s stories of his birth. Annunciation by angels. A virgin conception. A miraculous star. Angels. The glory of God shining in the heavens. Matthew calling him Emmanuel, God With Us. The most profound statement of Jesus’ divinity in the New Testament of course isn’t in either birth story, it’s in the Gospel of John. That’s what we’ll end our scripture reading with tonight: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Jesus is fully human, but he is also fully divine. There’s a line in the Christmas song “Mary Did You Know?” that sums the point up perfectly. The lyric goes: “Mary did you know that when you kissed your little baby you kissed the face of God?” A little baby who is the face of God. That’s who we welcome into the world tonight.

Folks, that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine is almost incomprehensibly great good news there ever was or ever could be. At Christmas we don’t just celebrate the birth of a great man. We do so much more than that. We celebrate God coming to earth in the person of a newborn baby. We celebrate God coming to earth in the particularity of one child. We celebrate the Universal becoming particular—for us. We celebrate the Infinite becoming finite—for us. We celebrate the Immortal becoming mortal—for us. We celebrate God coming to us not in mere words in a book but in a human life, in a way we can see, in a way we can relate to because God comes in a human life not so very different from our own human lives. Many Christians believe that God’s greatest revelation to us the Bible, but really, God’s greatest revelation to us is Jesus Christ to whom the Christian New Testament testifies. God’s greatest revelation to us the Immanuel, God With Us, whose birth we celebrate tonight.

And really isn’t that Christmas by itself is that great revelation. At Christmas Jesus is just a newborn baby, helpless, voiceless, powerless. It’s what we learn from Jesus as an adult that makes him worth celebrating as an infant. In Jesus as a adult we learn a lot of things about God, but the the thing that we learn that I want to celebrate tonight is that God is love. God comes to us in Jesus because, as the Gospel of John says, God so loved the world. God comes to us in Jesus to reveal God’s love for all people. Jesus loved all people. Maybe not at first. There is the way he treated the Syro-Phoenician woman that troubles many of us. But eventually. Eventually he got it that God’s love is for everyone. God’s love is even for us.

That’s the great good news of Christmas. Gos comes to us as one of us. God reveals Godself as fully as we mere mortals are capable of understanding. God comes to us in love and calls us to love God, others—all others, and ourselves just as God does. None of us does it perfectly, but God forgives our imperfections. Jesus is God With Us, and God is love.

So as we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ this year let’s do our best to show God’s love to the whole world and everyone in it. Those it is easy to love, and more importantly those it is hard to love. If we can do that, then our Christmas celebration will truly have meaning. If we can do that we will show that we understand God With Us. We will show that we understand what Christmas is really about. May it be so. Amen.