Christmas Banquet Homily for Bridges - Down He Came From Up
Down he came from up,
and in from out,
and here from there.
A long leap, an incandescent fall
from magnificent to naked, frail, small,
through space, between stars,
into our chill night air,
shrunk, in infant grace,
to our damp, cramped earthy place
among all the shivering sheep.
And now, after all,
there he lies, fast asleep.
- Luci Shaw
That’s a poem that talks about the Incarnation, the reason we celebrate Christmas.
Here’s a passage from the Bible that talks about the same thing:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1-4; 14)
We live in a secular culture that is not much interested in the actual meaning and value of Christmas.
Most of us are over-familiar with Santa and with being pressured to buy, buy, buy...stuff at Christmas, as if giving and receiving stuff was the point of Christmas. But it’s not.
The actual point of celebrating Christmas is to remember; to remember something incredibly important and something incredibly beautiful.
What matters is that something wonderful happened that changed the course of human history.
In small ways and big ways, the world has been impacted by the incarnation of Jesus, by the birth of God-in-the-flesh.
First of all, think of the year of your birth. What’s the year you were born. Mine is 1962.
Do you know why your birth year is the number that it is? It’s because they count years based on when Jesus was born.
I was born 1962 years after Jesus’ birth.
You have your own number of years - but what that number of years really represents is the number of years since the Saviour of humankind was born into this world.
Jesus literally divided history between what we call BC and AD. No one else in human history has done anything like that. That’s impressive.
The Bible says: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us”.
That means, to cut out a lot of detail, that God, the maker of Everything in the universe, the Creator of heaven and earth, put on flesh and pitched his tent among us.
Christmas is all about the entry into the world of the person who is the key to transformation.
We celebrate Advent leading up to Christmas, and we celebrate Christmas in the Christian faith tradition, because we know how important it is that God became a human being in the person of Jesus.
We know how important it is that God showed us how to live through the teachings of Jesus. We also understand that through following Jesus, through the choice to make him a real part of our own life story, that we give ourselves the best possible opportunity to succeed in our lives, to succeed in our goals.
Bridges is about positive change. It is about transformation. It is about improving our lives. It is about experiencing real change in how we think, how we understand ourselves, how we feel about ourselves;
how much energy and courage we have to face new challenges.
The gift of God’s Son, who laid down His perfect life in order to rescue us from a life without God - which is ultimately, if you really, really think about it, a life without purpose and meaning.
On the front of the Toronto Star today is news about the funeral of billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman, who it appears were murdered in their home last week.
Barry wrote in his diary from 1991 that he believed that life was purposeless and meaningless without God. He wasn’t wrong.
That’s what I realized at one point when I was a lot younger as well. I didn’t believe in anything, and that led me to despair, to wanting to and then trying and nearly succeeding ending my life.
Life without God is empty. But I’m so glad that there is actually no such thing as life without God.
When I was convinced there was no God, that didn’t make God go away. He still loved me. When I believed that nothing mattered and that life was meaningless...that didn’t make it true.
It just made it seem real to me. God still loved me, and He knew me inside out and He drew me to Him, in part through a community not unlike this one.
What we believe about God has no impact on the reality of God. But it does impact life for us.
Last night I was at Roy Thompson Hall with some family members watching and listening to Handel’s Messiah.
Some of my family members don’t believe in God. They sat there unmoved and unchanged and unimpressed when the symphonic orchestra and the Mendelsohn Choir belted out: “For the Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth. Hallelujah”.
Me? I was in tears of Joy, because I know those words are true. And I know that the God who reigns in power and glory loves me and holds me in His strong hand. I am safe in Him, and my life means something because Jesus came and gave His life for me.
So you see, the only impact of not believing is that we prevent ourselves from entering into the joy of trusting God, of knowing God, of living with the confidence and energy and hope that comes from trusting what He says.
We close ourselves off in a little bubble, the way I was when I was young, that says this material world and its processes is all there is, and we remain blind to reality as it actually is.
Lovingly created by God, Who has entered into this world to reconcile us to Him through the sacrifice, through the blood that Jesus shed for us.
God wants this life to mean as much to us as it means to Him. He wants you to know that He loves you. He wants you to know that you can live life to the fullest by placing your trust in His only begotten Son.
So as Christmas approaches, as the day draws near when a lot of us will celebrate the day that marks the birth of the Son of God, be bold and find a new openness to consider the mystery of how God loves you, and you, and you, and me so much that He sent His one and only Son into the world so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but instead receive the gift of eternal life? Amen.
