This Week's Sermon
Love ... Gotta Have It
In my travels this week, I passed a church that had a beautiful nativity set on their front lawn. It was about half as tall as a full-size nativity, had a stable and all of the usual characters.
It looked beautiful from the side, and I was eager to get closer and get a look at it straight on. I looked out to my left as soon as the church yard was in full view to take a long look at the nativity. It was as beautiful and detailed as I had hoped.
And it also was surrounded by a huge, thick piece of Plexiglas.
How ironic that a visual example of God coming down to the world to offer us life, grace, forgiveness and hope was encased and cut off from that very world by a “look but don’t touch” piece of plastic.
That Plexiglas around the nativity was an unfortunate analogy about how many people view God. They see God as remote and out of touch. They believe that God sits up on a cloud and watches all of us humans run around like ants at a picnic. Popular culture has too often pictured God as apathetic and uninvolved, and followers of God as judgmental, angry, and uninterested in anyone other than themselves. The notion of God as hope, as peace, as joy and as love is largely absent from our culture. The idea that God cares about each and every person ever created is foreign. The thought that God would come to earth is impossible.
But that coming to earth is what we’re here to celebrate, isn’t it? Christmas is about God coming to earth in the form of a vulnerable, poor, homeless infant. We’re so close to the moment that we can almost reach out and touch it. We’ve spent the past four weeks in the season of Advent, preparing our hearts and our minds for Christ’s coming. We’re asking ourselves, this year, how we truly can have a life-giving Christmas – not an anxious one or a stressful one or a superficial one, but a Christmas that reorients our hearts, refocuses our priorities and renews us. Our first week we talked about hope – what is our deepest hope, our Christmas wish this year? The second week, we talked about peace – how we can find it and live with it? Last week, we celebrated Joy – what is joy that gets us through troubled times? Today, we’re exploring love - Love that came down at Christmas.
One of the Beatles’ more popular songs was, “All you need is love.” And yes, that is what we need to survive and to thrive and just to make it through the day. The knowledge that we are loved. Having someone to love. Being loved in very tangible ways. We too often think of love as something that is flowery, romantic, warm and fuzzy. But all of us who have experienced love know that love is often hard work. It requires selflessness, courage, and commitment. True love is patterned after God’s perfect love. Today, we get a glimpse of God’s love up close and personal, not surrounded by a protective plastic wall, in Joseph, the husband of Mary and the adoptive father of Jesus. Through Joseph, we get a glimpse of many ways God reaches out to us, through the divide of our humanity, our sin, and our freedom of choice.
Last week we talked about how little time we spend with John the Baptist. Well, we spend even less time with Joseph. In the nativity story, almost everyone else gets a starring role. The angels? Hark, hear how they sing. The shepherds? They get their own songs. The magi, or wise men? They get their own day, Epiphany, January 6. Even the inanimate objects like the Little Town of Bethlehem and the Morning Star, So Fair and Bright, get their own song titles. But Joseph? He rarely gets mentioned, and is usually stuck at the back of the nativity scene, a dutiful but bland part of the cast.
And yet Joseph has one of the most crucial parts in God showing us love up close and personal. He did three important things to magnify God’s love for us: he loved God enough to listen, he loved Mary enough to sacrifice, and he loved Jesus enough to adopt him as his own.
At the very beginning of the lesson today, we see Joseph loving God enough to listen to him. God gave Joseph this amazing dream where an angel cam and spoke to him, telling him not to fear and to do this miraculous act of marrying Mary on God’s behalf. Joseph did not dismiss the dream; he was not afraid, and he took Mary as his wife like the angel said. Later, after the baby was born, he loved and listened again, and he gave the baby the name God instructed - Jesus, which means salvation, or God saves.
When we are in a worried state, do we dismiss the signs that God gives to us? Joseph could have ignored the dream, dismissed it as a fleeting memory the next morning. Instead, he realized that God was speaking to him, he paid attention and loved God with obedience.
This Christmas, how is God calling you to experience God’s hand-on love by paying attention to the messages God offers, no matter their medium? What sign is God offering to you of how you are to live your life? What message does God want you to receive? How can you leave enough space in your schedule, your heart, your life to fully embrace God’s word of love to you this week and beyond?
Second, Joseph loved Mary enough to sacrifice for her. Marriage in Jesus’ day was arranged. He may have met her once or seen her in a group, but he probably never even had a conversation with her. They weren’t in love the way we think of when we meet an engaged couple.
In spite of their infrequent contact, he loved her with a love that was fierce, that was courageous, that was sacrificial. Before God spoke to him in the dream, he was ready to divorce her quietly. In that day, marriages were legally binding after the engagement. If a woman was found to be pregnant between the engagement and marriage, she was terribly shamed, along with her family. She could even be stoned to death.
Joseph was willing to lay his own reputation on the line for Mary. He was ready to follow through on his love by taking a risk that he would be shunned by his own family, not to say the butt of jokes in his community. He loved her with a sacrificial, God-like love.
This Christmas season, God is showing us sacrificial love in sending a baby, vulnerable and innocent, to bear the weight of the world. In this next week, how is God calling you to share and receive this type of sacrificial, courageous love?
Third, Joseph loved Jesus as his own son. Joseph adopted Jesus into his family tree and Jesus adopted him into a new family, God’s family. This earthly father and heavenly and earthly son model for us how God desires for us to live with one another and with God. Jesus’ coming inaugurated a new world order, what we know as Kingdom living. In the kingdom, love knows no boundaries – love is not limited to bloodlines or ethnic groups. Jesus is God’s sign and gift to us that now, love is in the world, unleashed and loose, never to be contained or segregated again. The love between Joseph and Jesus is a testament to the power of Godly love in our world.
Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, God is with us. All the time, everywhere. This is the message of the coming baby Jesus – Jesus is a gift of God’s love, God’s strong love like Joseph had for God, for Mary, and for Jesus, a husband has to his wife, a father to a child, to reassure us that we are never alone. God comes to us in gentle messages, in opportunities to sacrifice, by adopting us into a new family, a family that is eternal. God is no longer separate from us, but with Emmanuel, the barrier is broken and love is here.
Last night at the Live Nativity, we experienced Emmanuel, God with us, in a very real and tangible way. There was no plastic wall between those of us who were the characters and those of came to witness the quiet and simplicity of the scene.
Near the end of the night, a family arrived with two small children, a girl who was three or so and a boy who was around five. The father leaned down and explained who all the characters were in the scene. They walked over and looked at the sheep. Then, the parents and sister were ready to go in from the cold. But the little boy sat down on a bale of hay, with a most delighted look on his face, and made himself comfortable. He kicked his feet, he pulled the hay out of the bale in big handfuls, he looked at the living nativity and laughed with joy. He was experiencing God’s love in a tangible, real way, not hidden behind a plastic wall but right here, right now. This Christmas, may we all experience love coming down at Christmas, in the form of Jesus. Amen.