Sermons for the Month

We Are Found As We Look For Jesus
DATE: December 24th, 2006
SERVICE: Christmas Eve
TEXT: Luke 2:1-20

“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

Tonight I'm going to begin with three stories of people who are looking for something.

The first comes from a Miss Manners column that I saved from last year at Christmas time. The Gentle Reader wrote in to ask advice about making her family's Christmas celebration more meaningful. She was concerned because the conversation among the children was about nothing but, "What did you get", while the adults focused on food. She indicated that their family is not religious, so they do not attend a worship service, and, she wrote "maybe that's the trouble". She longed for some part of the day to be about something other than food and gifts.

Miss Manners advised her to develop some family traditions like reading aloud from a Christmas book or singing carols or having the children who are taking music lessons give a mini-recital. These things would add meaning to the day, she wrote.

The second person who is looking for something writes a column in the Medina Gazette. He too would like Christmas to be more spiritual and wrote about his annoyance that businesses using the phrase "Merry Christmas" in their advertising are somehow promoted above retailers who use generic terms like "holidays" or "season".

You see, he would prefer that the word "Christmas" never appear in the sales campaigns of stores because the significance of the day has "nothing to do with the multi-billion-dollar consumer feeding frenzy that begins before Halloween and ends with the after-New Year sales." He would rather "Christmas" and "shopping" were not associated at all.(1)

The third person who is looking for something is in an account written by Christian author Frederick Buechner about being in Rome at Christmas. He went to St. Peter's on Christmas Eve to see the Pope celebrate Mass. A massive crowd gathered both inside of and around the Cathedral. People waited for hours; now and then there was spontaneous singing of Christmas hymns.

Then, a hush fell over the crowd as the Pope approached riding on a golden throne carried by the Swiss Guard. As the procession passed him Buechner noticed that the Pope was leaning slightly forward and peering into the crowd with intensity. He writes, "Through the thick lenses of his glasses the Pope's eyes were larger than life, and he peered into my face and into the faces around me and behind me with a look so deep and so charged that I could not escape the feeling that he must be looking for someone in particular." (2)

All of these people are looking for something. What is it? I choose to believe that they are looking for Jesus, for that baby born in the stable and laid in a manger whose birth we celebrate tonight.

The woman who wrote to Miss Manners is dissatisfied with her family's inward focus, and accurately identified what might be wrong when she wrote, "We are not very religious people, and perhaps that's the trouble." I'm not sure that reading "The Night Before Christmas" and singing "The 12 Days of Christmas" will meet her need.

The columnist is looking for Jesus in the midst of a materialistic world. He is fighting an uphill battle to disassociate shopping from Christmas.

And in the last account the Pope was looking into the eyes of those gathered to celebrate our Lord's birth, no doubt hoping to see a flicker of understanding about the significance of the night reflected in their eyes.

They are all looking for Jesus. And I guess the next logical question is, are we looking for him too as we gather here this evening? Are we expecting to identify with the faithful - joyful and triumphant - that we'll be singing about in a few minutes? Are we expecting to be filled with forgiving love as we receive Holy Communion tonight? When we sing about the silent night of his birth and the lights are dimmed, do we expect to see the Light of the World reflected in the candles around us?

And what about when you go home, will Jesus greet you at the door and enjoy the celebration of his birth with you? Will his peaceful presence be obvious as you gather with family and friends - some of whom, I would guess, are quite imperfect? When you battle the traffic on Tuesday, or prepare for that New Year's Eve gathering next Sunday, or settle back into a normal routine on January 2, or cheer on the Buckeyes later that week, will you still be looking for Jesus and welcoming him into your life?

How will that transform who you are and how you live? Because, you see, if that is not the case, then we have not found him, or more accurately, allowed him to find us.

There are many aspects of the Christmas story that are moving, but one that has always amazed me is how Mary responded to learning that she would be the mother of Jesus. An angel comes to announce that she will have a baby, the Son of God conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and she accepts God's will. "Here I am, the servant of the Lord: let it be with me according to your word." You could say that Jesus found her, and she was not even looking. But she received him, and was transformed.

At Thanksgiving I participated in an ecumenical service at Our Lady of the Elms where Alea Sears is a student. We sang the school hymn and there was one line in it that captured my attention. Singing to Mary it goes like this, "Here seeking an example, we turn our eyes to see, how grace received and cherished brought Jesus forth from thee…."

It occurred to me that as we receive God's grace in our lives and cherish it, Jesus is born again and again through us. That means that when we - and those around us - look for him he is found in our lives. And, the more we are aware of his presence, the more we turn to him for guidance, the more we give thanks for his forgiving love, the more we are transformed and Jesus is found in obvious and unexpected ways over and over again.

So, he is with us as we sing, as we receive Communion and he is reflected in the candlelight. Jesus has a place at our Christmas celebrations and moves with us beyond these 12 days of Christmas into the rest of the year.

The truth is this; he has found us, so finding him is a matter of opening our eyes, and our hearts.

AMEN

(1) "Holidays That Don't Come From a Store" by John Gladden, Medina Gazette, November 2006.

(2) Sermonwriter, Christmas Eve/Day, Luke 2:1-20, pg. 9, www.sermonwriter.com

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