A Savior has been born to you!

Isaiah 9:2-3; 6-7, Luke 2:1-15
First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin, NY, December 24th 2012

A printable PDF file can be found here

It has been quite a year hasn't it? Certainly a year filled with some joyful moments but also it's moments of darkness and despair. For myself the year started out in fine form. I celebrated last Christmas by surprising my wife with the unexpected visit of our son and his girlfriend from Maui to celebrate the holidays. In the Spring we managed to visit my homelands. I celebrated Easter preaching on Jones Beach for a Council of Churches Sunrise service. Seemed like it was going to be a fine year.

Things shifted gear around August time. I had a youth camp I helped lead in West Virginia. The last night a storm blew in that took out power from much of West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland. It was a gift that I managed to find gas and get home safely. I was attending another camp, in Pennsylvania a few weeks later, when I  received news that my mum had passed away. This obviously meant another, not so joyful trip, to my homelands, to say our good-byes.

Then, just as the politicians were rolling out their closing speeches as to why we should re-elect them, along came Sandy. When she was a couple of days away people were saying, 'Ah, we've had hurricanes before'.  Sandy arrived and proved to be more than we could cope with. Life has changed in her wake and our communities continue to rebuild. Folk have been using the phrase 'the new normal' to describe how we have to adapt and change in the light of visits of future storms.

A storm of a different kind erupted in Newtown, Connecticut as a lone gunman went on a violent rampage in an elementary school taking the lives of so many innocent young children and their gifted teachers. Such was the kind of unthinkable crime that we just never thought could happen. The debate needs to continue about gun ownership and security. For sure, for many folk in our area, it's a different kind of world that we are entering into in 2013 than we entered into in 2012.

As we reflect on the Christmas story there are many connections with our past year. The joy of Mary's pregnancy becomes the nightmare of having to travel to register their existence thanks to a government census. They find themselves homeless and the birth has to take place in the bleakest of conditions.

Shepherds on a hillside are astonished when, to them, of all people, comes an angelic message, “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; He is the Messiah, the Lord. “ Encounters like that and messages for the whole world, didn't usually happen in their neighborhood, or involve folk like them.

There is the account of travelers from afar, following a star, who come to proclaim a newborn King. In their aftermath, in accounts we usually consider after Christmas, comes the slaughter of innocents by the megalomaniac King Herod, and the need for the holy family to flee as refugees to Egypt before they can ever return home.
We find images of displacement, of bereavement, of suffering and mayhem, of folks being unable to return to their homes,  of people from outside the area coming to worship and serve, even of the slaughter of innocents at the hands of a lunatic... all these are part of the Christmas story.

Yet the most important part is that far from being absent, these events mark the entrance of God's love into our striving, in and through the life of Jesus Christ. The technical term is 'Incarnation', giving rise to phrases in our Christmas carols such as we sang earlier in our service from 'Hark the Herald Angels:-

“Veiled in flesh the God-head see; Hail the incarnate Deity,
    Pleased in flesh with us to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel.”

We do not proclaim a God who is far off and remote but One who comes where we are and enters into our lives. Nowhere in our worship is that more visibly expressed than around the table laid with bread and wine. At Christmas we celebrate God enters into our life. At Easter time we celebrate He also walks with us through times of abandonment, betrayal, suffering and death... all the way through to life eternal.

All of life, past, present and whatever comes after, is tied up with this God who reveals love through a child born at Christmas. We stand with the shepherds on that hillside and wonder what it can mean to hear declared; “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; He is the Messiah, the Lord. “

The carol 'Silent night' includes a phrase that speaks of the birth of Jesus as being  'the dawn of redeeming grace'. That is what we should be seeking this year around  the communion table. The redeeming grace of God.

The grace of God to redeem what we have lost. And many have lost much this year. Some have lost loved ones. Some have lost homes. Some have lost work. Some have lost hope. Some have been subjected to unthinkable acts of violence that have stolen their little ones from them. Life can not continue the same as it ever was.

We need the redeeming grace of God to guide us towards an uncertain future. We need the comfort of God's Holy Spirit to descend upon us and to be born afresh within us. We need the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ to transform our lives. We need each other to rebuild our communities. We need to pray together and worship together so that together we encounter God's transforming, redeeming, amazing grace.

I invite you to come to the table this night, that love may be born afresh, so that hope may become an option and to commit your life, not to more of the same, but to entering the New Year with a commitment to service, in Jesus name. “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; He is the Messiah, the Lord. “ Amen!

Adrian J. Pratt