Sermon Title: "Love Came Down at Christmas"
Date: December 5, 2010
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  1 John 4:7-12, 19-21

Our house is all decorated for Christmas save for one item:  the Christmas tree.  Now I love Christmas trees as much as anyone, but for me that would not be the missing element.  The most meaningful decoration for me was the one I put up on Friday evening:  the crèche.

I lovingly unpack each porcelain figure from its box and place it in the order I believe events occurred.  (You would expect me to be this compulsive!)  First, the stable and the cow.  Then Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus and the donkey.  Next the angel, who summoned the shepherds.  They arrive with their sheep.  Somewhere along the line came the innkeeper, kneeling with a lamp at the manger.  Finally, three wise men and a camel complete the scene. 

Our collection began in 1981, with additional figures added to the set each year through 1992, when I baulked and declined to purchase when Avon offered the Samaritan woman at the well.  ‘What?’ I thought.  ‘She didn’t come on the scene until Jesus ministry.’  And I have the habit of lovingly packing away the crèche scene on Epiphany, January 6, in the order I imagine the participants departed.  First to go must have been the innkeeper.  He had other tasks.  Then the shepherd and sheep returned to abide in the fields.  Finally the wise men headed back East, and the Holy Family departed for Egypt.  I’m not sure when the angel exited the scene.

As I unpacked the figurines Friday night, I thought of the Avon lady in Corning who sold them to us.  Each year she bought the new figurines, showed them to other customers, then sold them to us at her cost.  I always thought it ironic that Muriel Leventhal, a Jewish lady, sold us our crèche figures—and to a Christian minister at that!  But Jesus and his family were Jewish, so it all seems to make sense in the long run.

As I said, I undertake this task lovingly, just as I suppose many of you go about your Christmas decorating and shopping lovingly.  You have favorite decorations that have been passed down by parents, made by your children or grandchildren.  You make recipes for desserts and eggnog that may go back generations in your family.  Even amidst hectic shopping, you cannot help but think of the recipient’s face as he or she opens the gift.

I have mentioned “lovingly” several times already, and that is appropriate, for as James W. Moore wrote in this week’s chapter on love in our Advent study guide, “The essence of Christmas is love, God’s incredible love for us, expressed when God sent Christ into the world to save us.  ‘Love Came Down at Christmas’—that’s how the hymn writer puts it.  Whenever and wherever we receive God’s sacrificial love, whenever and wherever we pass it on to others, whenever and wherever God’s love is accepted and shared, Christmas comes once again!”

I’m choosing to use Moore’s three main points for my sermon today.  The first is When We Love God, There Is Christmas.  When we think of adoration at the manger, we tend to focus on those who traveled farthest, those grand and mysterious wise men.  Yet it was the shepherds who were first astonished by the angel’s glad tidings and then, leaving the fields, fell down in awe, wonder and commitment before the manger of God’s love.  I asked Julie Ramsey to adjust the Advent candle song we sang earlier this morning to better fit the theme of love.  It had to be but five syllables, and she wrote “coming from above.”  That is God’s greatest gift of love, coming down to us in the human form of his Son, Jesus. 

One of the best-known and most beloved verses in all the Bible is John 3:16.  Many of you could quote it from memory.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  We tend to think of it in terms of the crucifixion—God gave up his only Son.  Yet when God entered human time in the infant Jesus, it was then that he gave the world his only Son.  That’s what Christmas is really all about.  We needed a Messiah and God sent us one.  We needed a Christ and God sent us one.  We needed a Savior and God gave the world his only Son.

Moore’s second point is When We Love our Families, There is Christmas.  The good news is that when God wanted to send his Son, he didn’t just wander out of the wilderness to be baptized by John at age 27.  He was born to a human mother, just as each of us was, into the midst of a human family.  In his Gospel, Mark quotes the synagogue leaders early in Jesus’ ministry:  “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” (6:3)  So God, through Christ, experienced life in a family, just as we did.

“Sadly, in some families there is estrangement, alienation, division, uneasiness, tension, bitterness, hostility, made all the more graphic by the sacredness of the Christmas season.  How many squabbles will break out this Christmas season because somebody in a family got mad?  How many embarrassing scenes will unfold?”  They may come from old grudges, from drinking too much, from political arguments, by being placed in proximity to people one seeks to avoid the rest of the year.

If any of this sounds vaguely familiar to your family gatherings, I urge you to do all within your power to be at peace with those whom you share the holidays.  The unknown author John makes this point in his first letter:  “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.  The command we have from him is this:  those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” ( 1 John 4:20-21)

“Whenever and wherever there is peace and harmony and tenderness and respect and thoughtfulness and caring in the family, Christmas comes once again.  When we love God, and when we love our families, there is Christmas!”

Finally, Moore broadens the scope of love by declaring When We Love Other People, There Is Christmas.  I cannot remember whether it was in junior high or high school that I read George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner, the story of a bitter old man, unlucky in love and shunned by his community.  He withdraws into an isolated cottage to eke out his days as a weaver.

Silas cares for little, other than sending the shuttle of his loom back and forth — and the money he earns doing it.  And so, one day, when a burglar breaks in and steals every last piece of gold from the hiding place under his floorboards, it seems Silas has nothing left to live for.  He spends his evenings standing at the open doorway of his cottage, hoping against hope that someone will happen along and return his treasure.

What Silas receives, instead, is a very different treasure.  A little blond-haired girl — whose homeless, opium-addicted mother has just died in the snow — toddles toward the light of his doorway and walks in as though she owns the place.  The little girl falls asleep on his hearth.  As he gazes down at the golden-haired child, Silas thinks to himself:  “Gold! — his own gold — brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away!  He felt his heart beat violently ... the heap of gold seemed to glow ... he leaned forward at last and stretched forth his hand; but instead of the hard coin with the familiar resisting outline, his fingers encountered soft, warm curls.”

The rest of the novel tells the story of the melting of Silas Marner’s heart as he adopts the toddler and becomes both father and mother to her.  Plundered of his life’s savings, robbed of all that he once held dear, Silas Marner is granted a sign of God’s love — not a babe in a manger but a little child stretched out upon the warm stones of his hearth.

“In old days,” writes Eliot, “there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction.  We see no white-winged angels now.  But yet men are led away from threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they may look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.”

The message of this story is a big part of Christmas.  Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”  (Matthew 25:40)  “When we love God, when we love our families, when we see Christ in other people and love them, then at that precise moment Christmas comes once again.”

[Portions in quotations taken from Christmas Gifts That Won’t Break,

by James W. Moore. © 2010 Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN, pp. 18-22.]