SERMON 478
CHRISTMAS DAY –
ISAIAH 52:7-10, PSALM 98, HEBREWS 1:1-12, JOHN 1: 1-14
OUR GOD REIGNS!
Beloved in the Lord, grace
and peace be unto you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus
Christ, and from the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life.
On A balmy October afternoon
in 1982, Badger stadium in Madison Wisconsin was packed. There were more than
sixty thousand die hard
It turned out that there was
another game going on at the same time; a baseball game. And in that game the
Milwaukee Brewers, another
It was
In our lesson from Isaiah we
hear the prophet announcing the good news. People were told to lift up their
voices and cheer and shout for joy. In the midst of the ruins of
As we look at our lessons on
this Christmas morning we shall echo the voice of the sentinel in Isaiah and
use for the words of our theme, OUR GOD REIGNS! OUR GOD REIGNS!
When you turn on the radio to
listen to the news, morning or evening, what we normally hear are tales of one
disaster after another. O yes, there can be good news too. Who can possibly
complain about the lovely weather to which we have been treated in this past
week? But our supreme court, in this Christmas season, has just told us that
people in this country can engage in any form of sexual activity, in any place,
without any fear of reprisal. As long as they are not hurting anybody they can
do as they please. It does not at all sound like our God reigns. In this
country there appear to be no more moral standards. Tolerance of everything
imaginable does now reign. It would appear that the evil one now reigns in this
once fair country.
But in the midst of this
horror story we hear another voice speaking to us. That voice tells us, “How
beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news, who announces salvation.” OUR GOD REIGNS still. Even in a
playboy country the beauty of the Lord will always shine forth in one fashion
or another.
And you, my friends, are the
voices that God will use to bring good news to announce salvation, to bind up
the broken hearted, to release the prisoner bound in lust or greed or misery.
Your feet, mangled though they may appear, are the beautiful ones.
You, my friends, have a most
holy calling. You have seen the glory of the Lord as it has been revealed to us
in the infant holy, in the cross ugly, in the tomb empty, in the baptism of the
spirit powerful and life giving. You are the messengers. You are the ones to go
and tell it on the mountains, in the valleys and on the plains. Yours are the
feet who are to be called beautiful.
Through you OUR GOD REIGNS!
On this Christmas day let us resolve to take upon ourselves this most holy
calling, renounce all complaining, and bring only the good news to all who will
listen.
OUR GOD REIGNS! “Shut Up,
will you please shut up!” We have said those words to others, and when we did
not dare say those words aloud we found ourselves saying them to ourselves, “Shut
up.” Human kind has been saying that to God for centuries. But there is no one
that can silence our God. God speaks and God will speak.
Our lesson from the book of
Hebrews tells us that God has, and continues to speak to us as he wills, and
not as we desire. In ancient times God spoke in many and various ways through
the prophets, in visions, in dreams, through angels, through signs and wonders.
God has unlimited ways of speaking to us. Indeed, even if God chose to be
silent, God would still be speaking to us in the creation around us. If we do
not hear we see the voice of God in what has been made. For this world came
into being by the Word of the Lord and that word we see in all that is around
us. God cannot and will not be silenced.
OUR GOD REIGNS! We have all
found ourselves speaking “for the last time”. “Listen! This is the last time I
am going to tell you this.” While God can never be silenced and will ever
speak, there is from God a final word too. And this final word is not a threat,
it the word of grace. Our lesson from Hebrews tells us that in these last days
God “has spoken to us by a Son.”
That son, through whom God
has spoken, has been referred to in Scripture in so many ways. We have heard
him referred to as the only begotten of the Father. We heard God call him “My
Beloved Son,” in the days when Jesus lived among us in the flesh. And in the
lesson from John we hear the Son spoken of as the Word. “In the beginning was
the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
We have been told that this
Word, born among us as Jesus, was the one through whom this world was created.
We have been told that this Word, born
among us, is also the one through whom the new heavens and the new earth is
being created. Jesus is most certainly the final word.
This final Word came among
us, we are told in John, full of grace and truth,
Our final words are often
filled with threats. God’s final word is always filled with righteousness and
mercy and faithfulness.
OUR GOD REIGNS! When we
consider our own lives we often wonder what we have done, and what we have
accomplished. Many of our expectations have not been met. Others have not
appreciated and followed through on the works that we left for them. And at the
end we just seem to wear out and fade away with very little trace of who we
have been.
But this is also true of the
creation that God put into place through the Son. We are told in the lesson
from Hebrews of these works of the living God, that. “they will perish, they
will wear out like clothing, they will be changed.” But that is only one way of
looking at it. We look at what is unseen.
We are told that God will
never perish and that his years will never end. So also it is with us, through
the Son born in our midst. We too will never perish. We will be changed to be
sure but we will never perish. And as for the works of our hands, we trust in
God to put them to good use for the sake of the kingdom, and so God will. God
has already won for himself the victory.
OUR GOD REIGNS! In the
beginning when God created the world he said, “Let there be light, and there
was light.” And then God brought life into being. When God sent his only
begotten son into our midst, he once again sent light into our midst. And the
light that God sent was life for all his sons and daughters.
A Sunday School teacher once
asked the children in her class, just before she dismissed them to go to
church, “And why is it necessary to be quiet in church?” Annie replied,
“Because people are sleeping.”
The world into which Jesus
came was certainly sleeping. They did not recognize him as the one through whom
the world came into being. They did not accept him as the Savior of the world.
But those who believed, those who were not sleeping, became the children of
God, born again for eternal life.
I have been reading a book called “Caring about
inactive church members.”
Many of the inactive people are not sleeping. There
are a host of reasons
why they may have dropped out. But of one thing we can
be certain, many
of them carry in their hearts the message, “No one
cares and no one misses
me.”
It is good to be reminded on this Christmas day that
there is light and life
outside these walls of the church. We are not the only
faithful ones. God has
the power to save to the uttermost. We have been given
the power to bear
witness to the light and to reach out both to those
who sleep and those who
think that no one cares and no one misses them.
So on this day and in this Christmas season let us continue
to fix our eyes on
those things that are unseen. Doom and gloom are not a
part of our
vocabulary. Our God will point our eyes to those to
whom we shall bear
witness to the truth, those to whom we are sent to
care for, those who think
that no one misses them. OUR GOD REIGNS and we reign
with him.
AMEN!