Christmas Eve – So What? 2018 Sermon

Merry Christmas! Here’s my 2018 Christmas Eve sermon. The text is the Christmas story from Luke.

Have you ever watched the show House Hunters? It’s one of my guilty pleasure comfort shows. There’s always a couple with a list of parameters and an impossibly high budget.

The real estate agent takes them to three houses, each of which fails to meet one of their criteria, and then they pick one and you wonder what on earth they’re thinking and how they can afford it. It’s incredibly formulaic, but it’s addicting.

The thing is, what house they pick has nothing to do with me. It makes absolutely zero difference in my life if they get the garden mansion or the cottage hideaway.
Who cares?

Let me tell you a story: Once upon a time, around 2,000 years ago, a peasant girl was engaged to be married. Much to her fiancé’s surprise and confusion, she was pregnant.

Fortunately, he decided to stay with her and raise the child as his own. Unfortunately, due to a poorly-timed government decree, they had to travel to the little town where his ancestors were from, and while they were there, she had the baby.

Who cares? Babies are born all the time. Unmarried women get pregnant, people travel, governments make inconvenient decisions. There were many babies born on the same day as this one, and I doubt any one today knows the name of a single one. None of them make the slightest difference in my life or in yours.

This baby’s name was Jesus, and I’ll admit some of the circumstances of his birth were kind of strange, but so what? What difference could it possibly make today that a child was born in a little village two millennia ago?

And yet, obviously, the birth of this baby is why you and I are here tonight. The birth of this baby is the reason, at least in theory, for over $1.1 trillion dollars in holiday retail sales, just in this country. 1.9 billion Christmas cards sent. 20.8 million live Christmas trees cut down each year. 96% of Americans celebrate this baby’s birthday, including 81% of non-Christians.

2,021 years ago, almost certainly not on December 25, a baby boy was born. So what? He’s not my child. He’s not even my great-great-great-great grandfather or something. This is a human child, born to a human mother. Everything is perfectly unremarkable.

Except, as we keep reading, this ordinary story gets a little strange. There are angels from heaven celebrating his birth, and shepherds who come to worship him. 12 days from now on Epiphany, we’ll hear about foreign magi who travel for weeks to bring gifts to this baby. In a less popular part of the story, a king will slaughter children in the area trying to kill Jesus.

All these strange events point to one vital fact about this baby much more important than whether there were angels announcing his birth, or whether Mary was a virgin, or what town he was born in. This baby is the Son of God. This little child is God in the flesh, Immanuel, God with us.

And that’s the point of the Christmas story. The immortal, all-powerful God with angel armies to sing his praises chooses to live as a human being, and not just to live as human, but to be born as an infant who needs his mother’s milk to survive, who needs his diapers changed. This isn’t just a dusty old story or a fairy tale; this is God breaking into our world.

Luke mentions emperors and kings and rulers, but Jesus is not born as a prince or a noble. When God chooses to be born into the world, he is born to common folks, born into humble circumstances. God becomes not some idealized, perfect person; God becomes one of us.

Jesus is born to experience our life in this flawed, broken world of sin and suffering, to redeem us and bring us back to God. You’re here tonight 2,021 years later, because this baby has made a claim on your life. Jesus has come because you matter to God.

That said, I won’t ask you to raise your hands or anything, but I am abundantly confident some of you have some other reasons for being here. Maybe you married into this church. Maybe being here tonight is keeping grandma happy, or even better, keeping your husband or wife’s grandma happy. Maybe everything else in town was closed tonight and you were hoping there’d be free Christmas cookies. Sorry. I’ll stop talking soon.

Or maybe you came tonight because you needed to hear this story. Maybe you’re here because everything else is falling apart and you really need to hear this promise that God understands what you’re going through and that God is on your side. This baby is born for you.

Maybe God brought you here tonight because more than anything else in the world, you need to hear that God comes to people who don’t have it all together.

God comes to people walking in darkness, people who have nothing to look forward to, who don’t dare hope life is going to get any better, people like unwashed, lowly shepherds working third shift who can’t get hired for any easier job. This baby is born for you.

Maybe it took everything you had tonight to come to Christmas Eve service alone for the first time, or for the first time since someone in your family died. Or maybe you’re just here tonight because you always come to church on Christmas Eve. This baby is born for you.

I don’t know why you’re here. Here’s what I do know: The God who created the universe loves you, and this baby is God’s love in the flesh.

This is not just an hour out of your life to listen to some feel-good story. This is not a predictable tv show to watch while you’re eating dinner so you can maybe live vicariously through someone else.

This is about a God who loves you enough to be born into your world, to show you a better way to live, and to die so you can have eternal life. May this baby change your life forever.

Our next carol is #40, What Child is This. As we sing, pay attention to the words, because they tell us why this baby matters. This ordinary child is Christ the king, the Word of God made flesh. This sweet child lying in a manger is the one who will be pierced through by nails and spear, who will bear the cross for me, for you. This is Immanuel, God with us.

What Child is This? This is God born among us. Hymn #40. Let’s sing.