December 24, 2016 – Christmas I
© 2016 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon is available here.
Into a broken, chaotic,
conflicted world, a child makes his appearance. The world around him is full of
pain and suffering, but he rests in a small, safe place. In the beginning, he
is no one of consequence—just a boy whose life is caught up with the worldly
powers that seek to rule him and his people. At first, only a handful of
onlookers notice him, but over time his story grows and spreads. The image of
that child on that night becomes a touchstone for millions of people. The
contrast between his innocence and gentleness and the harsh reality of life that
surrounds him and surrounds us all becomes too much for anyone to bear. Meek and
mild, he reveals the real suffering of the world to anyone who looks into his
eyes. He reminds us of the importance of hope. His silence demands a change
within us and within the world. As a weak and vulnerable child who captures the
hearts and minds and imaginations of the whole world, he shows us that things
don’t have to be this way. He allows us to dare to dream of a different sort of
world—one where pain and suffering and death are no more, where God’s peace and
justice are real for everyone.
That child’s name is
Omran Daqneesh, but you might know him better as the Syrian boy whose face
“became a symbol of Aleppo’s suffering.”[1]
Although video of that night shows a boy who sits alone in an ambulance and who
seems overwhelmed by his circumstances, wiping his bloodied face and then not
knowing what to do with his blood-stained hand, it was the still images of that
boy, staring straight ahead as if to look right through us, that tore my heart
in two. As Anne Barnard reported in the New
York Times, Omran was one of twelve victims under the age of fifteen
treated in Aleppo that Wednesday—“not a particularly unusual figure”—but this one
boy felt different.[2] As
his photograph spread across the Internet and newspapers and the nightly news,
the world seemed to notice again what it had conveniently forgotten: that there
is indiscriminate suffering and death taking place in the world right now and
that the world is desperate for a change.
Of course, two thousand
years earlier another child was born in that same region—one who not only
reminded us how to have hope but who was and is hope itself. His picture did
not make it into the newspaper, but his story grabbed the hearts and minds of
millions of people. Luke set that story amidst the powers of his day—Emperor Augustus
and Quirinius, who was governor of Syria at that time—but this child’s path was
different from theirs because the hope he brought was different. At long last,
God had come to his people to give them the peace and prosperity that they had
dreamt of for generations. This was the moment when God’s gracious rule was to
be established through Jesus, who was and is the Savior, the Messiah, the Lord.
But, because this hope and this peace came from God himself, they had to be
different—the kind of true and lasting hope and peace that only God himself
could bring.
Emperor Augustus decreed
that the whole world would be registered, counted, and taxed, but God used that
decree to bring Joseph and his fiancée Mary to Bethlehem, the city of David,
where the prophet Micah had foretold that God’s anointed ruler would be born.
The political and religious rulers of the day would never have permitted a
rival king to grow up in their midst, so God revealed this majestic birth not
to the authorities but to some lowly shepherds in a nearby field. Earthly kings
were born in palaces, but God’s Messiah was born in the lowliest of
circumstances to an unwed teenage mother and her working-class carpenter
husband, who wrapped their newborn in some spare rags and placed him in a feeding
trough because there was not even room for them in the inn. These were not
accidents. This was and is God’s plan. This weakness, this poverty, this
vulnerability—this is how God comes among us and establishes his everlasting
reign. This is God’s way. This is the hope that God gives us.
Aleppo reminds us that we
cannot defeat violence with violence. History shows us that we cannot triumph
over hatred with force. Our own neighborhoods prove that we cannot cure poverty
with money. Our own lives tell us that we cannot overcome sadness by trying
harder to be happy. The world needs a different kind of hope. The world is
desperate for a hope that has the power to take hold of our hearts and minds
and imaginations and to show us that it doesn’t have to be this way. We yearn
for a hope that can take on all that is broken in this world and in our lives
and finally make that brokenness whole. Tonight, we see again that that hope is
born in Jesus.
God does not defeat
weakness. God becomes weakness in order that weakness might be transformed. God
does not conquer poverty. God becomes poverty in order that poverty might be
redeemed. God does not cast out brokenness. God becomes brokenness in order
that brokenness itself might be made whole. That is the miracle of this night.
That is our true hope. In the baby Jesus, God takes upon himself all that is
wrong with this world in order to make it right by showing that God is
inseparable from our suffering. In that Bethlehem stable, God’s light shines in
the darkness—a gentle, warm, glowing light that beckons us into the very life
of God, that brings our deepest hurts into God so that they might be healed.
This is the hope that
transcends every struggle. This is the light that overcomes every darkness. Come
again to the stable and see God’s gift of himself to the world—not a king that
sits high above us on an unapproachable throne but the king who comes down to
us and meets us right in the very midst of our struggle. This is our savior.
This is our hope. God is with us, and, because of Jesus, we are with God, and
there is nothing that can ever take that away from us.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.