Sermon: The Work of Christmas
It’s only fitting that at
the beginning of a new year
we read the words of John
that start with
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the
Word was with God,
and the
Word was God.
2 He was in the beginning with God. ….”
This scripture reminds us that
Jesus has been with us
from the start of the
universe.
It sets up the concept of
the Trinity,
that Jesus, the Creator and the Holy Spirit
are one
and have been since the
beginning of time.
This quote from John just
packs a whole lot of theology
in a few succinct lines
of beautiful poetry
even though John can be hard
to understand sometimes.
But it is a story of
beginnings:
how the world began with
Christ.
So, today on our first
Sunday of the new year
we can take some time to
think
of how we can begin our
year with Christ.
Do we dare plan our year
ahead?
Based on 2021 we are
smart enough to know
that planning the next 12
months is kind of a gamble
the way things are going.
But we live on a planet that operates in a cycle
and our year has cycled
around to a new beginning
and we have an opportunity
to make new year's resolutions
or fill a new calendar or
make different choices.
And in a remarkable circumstance,
our new year falls
exactly one week after Christmas
so that we get a new year
right after the birth of our savior,
Could we have planned
this any better?
Maybe if we had a new
calendar year the week after Easter
it might have been more
meaningful.
But we re-start our
secular lives this week.
This might be an
opportunity to re-start our sacred life, also. January, 2022 could be a new
beginning for us,
for our spiritual lives.
About ten years ago I
heard a poem that stopped me dead in my tracks.
It’s printed on the cover
of our bulletin today.
And called The Work of
Christmas.
You are able to read it
for yourself.
I can tell you it has
become one of my favorite poems.
It’s majestic in its simplicity
When the song of the angels is
stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To
heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
And it’s been around in
so many different forms
that I’m not quite sure in
which form I first heard it.
I’ve seen it on a
greeting card
and heard it in an
elaborate choral arrangement
sung by none other than
the Meadows School of Fine Arts at SMU.
The words came from to the
Rev Dr Howard Thurman who died in 1981.
I had never even heard of
Howard Thurman until recently
but it turns out he was a
much-respected clergyman and quite a busy guy.
He wrote about 20 books, one of which,
Jesus and the Disinherited,
is usually required
reading in at least one class at most seminaries.
He ended his career as
the dean emeritus of the chapel of Boston University and was generally
considered to be the mentor of Martin Luther King
and the one who convinced
him to follow a path of non-violence.
This last fact caught me
by surprise
since I had always been
under the impression
Dr King had come up with
the idea
of using Gandhi’s
non-violent approach on his own
but it turns out that it
was Howard Thurman who talked him into it.
As my year of 2021
developed,
I kept hearing Thurman’s
name in Zoom meetings
and Facebook posts.
He showed up quoted in
sermons and special worship services.
So, getting back to the
poem, how do we begin our work of Christmas?
We can start anywhere we
want.
We can use our imagination,
or we can borrow an idea
from someone else.
One of the most fun
ministries I’ve ever taken part in
started out with the
memory of a ministry
my friend Linda
remembered when she was in college
that her home church in
Missouri had done for her
as a student far from
home.
She remembered getting a
care package at Halloween every year
and suggested that we
could do that for the kids at our church.
One of the other women in our circle of friends
took the idea and added to it
and it turned into an
annual tradition
that went on for probably
20 years.
One of the women in the
group was the church secretary
so we always had the most
accurate address for all the kids
without having to ask
anyone.
She made up the address
labels
that only gave a return
address of the church that read
“the angels of First
Presbyterian church”.
I had access to free UPS
shipping through the company where I worked
so we were able to send
some pretty big care packages at no cost.
And the best part about it was
that outside of the roughly six or seven women in our group who participated, no
one in our church or the kids ever knew who was sending the packages. The kids just knew that they could depend on
it.
One year, I was at a joint
meeting of the deacons and elders
when they were discussing
the various committees and their duties
and someone mentioned the
Halloween boxes.
One of the elders said
something about
“the boxes the deacons
send off at Halloween”
and the moderator of the
deacons said,
“We don’t do that; I
thought y’all did that.”
There was a majestic
silence around the table
while the leaders of the
church realized
there was a ministry
happening that none of them knew about.
I never said a word that night
and was content to leave the ministry anonymous.
I'm of the mind that there still needs to be some mysteries in good deeds.
But the beauty of it all,
and the moral of the story is that
When we go looking for
the work of Christmas
We don’t have to come up
with anything new
The Halloween boxes was
an idea we got from someone else
We didn’t have to invent
it on our own.
++++++++++++++
Now, when we read the
book of John
It can be a discouraging
endeavor.
So much of it is poetry
and has simple words
written in a beautiful way.
But it can be hard to
understand.
It’s appropriate at the
beginning of our year to read,
“In the beginning was the
Word….”
But then we usually
become discouraged
when we can’t understand
the rest of what John is saying.
I know I do.
John is hard to
understand.
Even the great preacher,
professor, and author
Barbara Brown Taylor
admits this.
When we understand that
God’s word
became flesh in the
person of Jesus Christ
then we can begin to
understand that our next step is Thanksgiving.
Or, as BBT tells it,
“Until
someone acts upon these words,
they
remain abstract concepts—
very
good ideas that few people have ever seen.
The
moment someone acts on them,
the
words become flesh.
They
live among us, so we can see their glory. “
In other words, we can
bring the word of the bible to life
through our own actions….
through our own lives.
our own flesh.
The work of Christmas is
Finding the lost, feeding
the hungry
And just when I thought I
had said it all
and there was nothing new
to say
my friend Linda sent me
an email
(This was another Linda....like most of us, I have about 3 friends named Linda)
that she had found
something else that Howard Thurman said.
She found something he
must have written
in one of those 20 books
he wrote.
He wrote one called “The
Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations.”
So she sent me this poem:
I will sing a new song
I must
learn the new song for the new needs
I must
fashion new words
born of all the new growth
of my life-
Of my mind—
of my spirit.
I must
prepare for new melodies
that have never been mine before.
That all that
is within me may lift my voice unto God.
Therefore,
I shall rejoice with each new day
And delight
my spirit in each fresh unfolding
I will
sing, this day, a new song unto the Lord.
The wise men that visited
Mary, Joseph and the baby
brought gifts.
The bible tells us they
brought gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Today we still bring
Jesus gifts.
How do we do something
for Jesus when he’s not here?
When he is not a physical
presence on earth today?
It’s as simple as that
one line in Matthew:
“When you do these things
to the least of these, you do them to me…”
What can we take the
Christ child?
What new thing will we
bring to this new year?
How can we attend to the
least of these?
The hungry and the
thirsty?
The refugee or the outcast?
listed in the Matthew 25
scripture
How can we travel with
the wise men of old?
What gift can we take to
the child
At the dawn of our new
year?
Perhaps we will take him
a new self
A healthier “me” who
takes better care of myself?
One who eats better and
exercises more
A person who prays more and spends
time listening for God’s voice?
We can put flesh on God’s
words
We can put our own flesh
on God’s words.
Let the work of Christmas
begin.
Our Benediction for the day also came from Howard Thurman, from his book "Meditations from the Heart":
A
Prayer For The New Year
God,
Grant that we may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart. There will be much to test us and make weak our strength before the year ends.
In our confusion we may often say the word that is not true and do the thing of which we are ashamed. There will be errors in the mind and great inaccuracies of judgment.
In seeking the light,
We
shall again and again find ourselves
walking
in the darkness.
We shall mistake our own light for Your light
and
we shall drink from the responsibility of the choices we make...
Though our days be marked with failures, stumblings, fallings,
let
our spirits be free
so
that You may take them and redeem our moments in all the ways our needs reveal.
Give us the quiet assurance
of
Your Love and Presence.
Grant
that we may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart. Amen
