Christmas Eve 2014

Luke 
2:
1-20

The Rev. Dr. Israel Ahimbisibwe

Let us pray. O God, help us to receive and accept the heavenly gift of your Son Jesus Christ and to allow and accept Him to be born in our lives. In this present age, help each of us to live lives that are self controlled, upright and godly while we await for the blessed hope and the manifestation of eternal salvation. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I want to welcome you all to this beautiful Christmas event, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, the savior of the world.

As we gather this evening, we come with different experiences and maybe for different reasons. Some of you are quite grateful that you have made it to another Christmas Eve. Some of you are here because you are spending the evening with family and friends. For some of you, this is the one time you feel you have to come to church. Some of you, in addition to many things going on in your lives, are feeling pain from the loss of a dear one, or are troubled by the condition of your loved ones who are sick, or are troubled by events in this country, or by disease, or by chaos and violence in other parts of the world. I, too, resonate with those experiences. I have known the joy and the pain, the exciting thrills and the bitter disappointments of this life. Even so, I have personally prayed for you all this afternoon that as you listen to the songs and to me as I preach, the Lord Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate, will touch your heart in some ineffable and unforgettable way.

As human beings, we have the reputation of failing to turn way from bad things. Humans are the only species who massively kill their own kind. When a group of people is subjected to injustice, they cry out and often get the freedom they long for, yet later on they forget and turn another group of people into victims of injustice and oppression. Problems, disappointments and frustrations in the world continue to appear, as the ebb and flow of a tide. There seems to be no end to it, and so we say, “History repeats itself”! At a time of the year like this, we feel like sending Christmas cards about peace on earth to those in pain as much as we can. But cards and statements of peace have neither the magic of bringing peace into the lives of people nor the magic of ending the chaos in the world.

This is where we find ourselves. But then Saint Luke the Evangelist tells us about this very unusual announcement that came from the angel of the Lord: “Do not be afraid, for I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord … Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom He favors!”

And this is how this story becomes very interesting: the angel who made the proclamation is not one of those cute little angels with a smiling face that we normally see on TV or on shopping bags. This angel is frightening. Angels in the Bible are always frightening – that is the main reason they always greet with, “Fear not”! An angel who is not frightening is not from God! Think about Moses, when an angel appeared to him to tell him to go to Egypt and bring out the slaves; think about Gideon, when an angel appeared to him to tell him to remove the oppression of the Amalekites from the Israelites; think about Mary, when the angel Gabriel appeared to her to tell her that she would conceive by the power of the Holy Spirit. They all received the message, “Fear not – the Lord is with you”!

The angel of God here says “do not be afraid” because, just as in all cases in which an angel appears, he brings the divine news that God is breaking into the world with power, that He breaks into our problems of chaos and confusion, of pain and frustrations, and that He replaces chaos with harmony and peace and joy. Everything that we are doing on this Christmas Eve is all about that.

But there is another part of this story that I believe is very important, too. We should not think of Jesus’ birth to Mary as a sort of a “miracle” in the way that we typically think of miracles. The whole process of the conception of Jesus and his birth was something controlled from heaven. So the baby in the manger is One who has come from the realms of glory – Jesus is not us and we are not him. He is “other” because He is beyond us, from another dimension.

Because we human beings can never turn ourselves away from problems that hurt us, we must be rescued from this other dimension that we cannot control. And so at Christmas, Jesus, the “other,” decides to become part of us.

That is the true Hebrew meaning of Emmanu (with us) El (God) = Emmanuel. He is “God with us,” living among us in order to help us turn around from chaos to peace. He is so involved with us that He enters our own dimensions of regret, failure, heartbreak, disgrace, and even death.

But He came and entered and shared those dimensions in order that He should reverse them for us. He entered them in order to help and teach us to renounce impiety and worldly passions and to help us live lives that are self controlled, upright and godly.

So on this blessed day of Christmas Eve, let us know that the baby in the manger is the Son of God. The proclamation of the angel to the shepherds is that our misery, our problems, our chaos and the entire course of human history can be reversed by the only One who has the power to do it. And it is God himself who announces on Christmas Eve, “Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favors.”

Amen.