Christmas in July Sermon 2021

Since we weren’t able to gather in-person for Christmas worship this last year, we at St. Peter held a Christmas in July worship service on Sunday, July 25, 2021. We included Christmas carols, the Christmas gospel, and even sang Silent Night by candlelight and had Christmas cookies for fellowship time!

This message is an adaptation of my Christmas Day sermon from 2016, my first Christmas here at St. Peter. Christas is about the miracle of God’s self-revelation to us in the person of Jesus Christ. God enters the world in humble circumstances, demonstrating God’s character. If you want to know who God is, look to Jesus.

 

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen

I heard once about a little boy in a Sunday School class who was drawing a picture, and his teacher asked him what he was drawing. He said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.”

She responded, “How are you drawing God? No one knows what God looks like?”

He looked up at her and said, “Well, maybe they don’t now, but they will when I get finished!”

One of the great questions of faith, is “How do we know about God?”

It’s a great question. I suspect if we tried to draw God, we’d all come up with something different. One of the fundamental characteristics of God is that God is so far beyond us that we can’t fully describe him.

In fact, even saying we can’t describe “him” goes too far, because God isn’t a him, or a her. God isn’t male or female. But God isn’t an “it”, either, because God is a personal, active being.

You start to see how our very human language is inadequate for fully grasping God. We don’t have the words—we don’t have the brainpower—to define a Being who exists for eternity, who creates the cosmos.

We can name characteristics of God, like God is loving, God is just, and God is patient, but there’s always more for us to learn.

The attempts we make to define God always end up being too small, because God doesn’t neatly fit into any box we can imagine. And yet the claim of the Christmas story—the claim of Christians—is that we can know something about God, because God has chosen to come to us as Jesus.

God has chosen to reveal Godself to us. God wants to be known by us. God longs to be in a relationship with us.

The reason we care about a child born two thousand years ago, the reason we celebrate Christmas, whether in December, or July, or whenever, is because in this baby born in Bethlehem, God has chosen to be revealed to us. This is more than a birthday party; this is God entering into the world, choosing to come in person.

A little later in the service, I’ll read the prologue to John’s Gospel. John describes God as the Word. God’s voice animates creation, God speaks and the world begins.

The Word was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him. And the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

The Message paraphrase of the Bible describes it like this: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” I love that image. God didn’t stay off somewhere far away in heaven; God moved into our neighborhood, into our lives. When we look at Jesus, the baby whose birth we celebrate today, we see God.

Trying to picture God the eternal, infinite Creator is more than our little human brains can handle. We can’t grasp God. We can’t draw that God.

Martin Luther in a Christmas sermon put it like this:

“I would not have you contemplate the deity of Christ, the majesty of Christ, but rather his flesh. Look upon the baby Jesus. Divinity may terrify man. Inexpressible majesty will crush him. That is why Christ took on our humanity, save for sin, that he should not terrify us but rather that with love and favor he should console and confirm.”

To understand God, we need to look at Jesus, God in the flesh. We look at the life he lived, we look at his healings, his teachings, at his death on the cross to forgive us, and we learn about God. Jesus is how we meet God.

Listening to Jesus’ teachings, we learn about the promise of God’s kingdom, we learn a better way to live. In Jesus’ miracles, we catch glimpses of God’s power. And in the Christmas story, in the way God chooses to enter the world, we learn something about the depths of God’s love for us and for the world.

God isn’t just found in the majesty, in the peaceful places, in the sacred; God is also found in the messiness and the chaos, in the weakness of a little baby. God moves into our neighborhood, which means we should go out there too. God cares about the world, so we should too.

We serve a God who chooses not to stay in heaven, but to get involved, to care, to have compassion, to act. We serve a God who made and formed humankind in God’s own image, then chose to be born a human.

God chose to become one of us, to experience the same things we experience, the emotions, the struggles, the joys, the passions of human life. God chose to become one of us, so that we could know God. We serve a God who chooses to be present not only in cathedrals and palaces, but in the muck of a barn, or more historically accurately, in the lean-to out back.

Born in scandal to an unwed mother, carried along as a refugee fleeing his homeland, growing up in an oppressed nation – Jesus experienced the struggles that come with this human life.

The Christmas message is that if you want to know what God looks like, what God is like, who God is, look to Jesus. The birth of the baby Jesus was announced by angels, yet Christmas calls us to look for God in the midst of this world. The one who spoke the universe into being chooses to come and be known in the least of these, in refugees and the unemployed and underemployed, in the lonely and the addicted.

To find God, look for the One who touches the lepers, who feeds the hungry, who heals the sick and eats with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors, the One who moves into our neighborhood. This is the One who reveals God to us.

This week in Kansas City, we talked a lot about what it means for us to be made in God’s image, and to look for God’s image in everyone we meet.

I think the Christmas story helps us to flesh out what God’s image looks like. Christmas tells us not to look for God’s image only in our family and our friends, not only in great philosophers or Olympic athletes or the people who seem to have it all figured out, but to look for God’s image in the man sitting in the shade on the side of the street, in the overwhelmed mother trying to raise two energetic boys under five, while herself in a recovery program, in the kid kicked out by their parents who’s staying in a shelter and trying to finish school.

God has chosen to enter this world, not only on December 25, not on our schedule, not only in the beautiful, sacred places where we might expect to encounter God’s presence, but in the midst of life – real, human life. That’s good news, because that’s where we are. Jesus is born into your life.

God is not just some spirit somewhere out there, something like the Force from Star Wars. Christmas tells us God is knowable. God is personal.

When you take communion in a few minutes and taste the body and blood of our Lord, Christ given for you, that’s personal. When you are drowned in the waters of baptism and given new life, that’s personal.

Christ our Savior is born, for you. God has come to you. Merry Christmas!