[Machine transcription]
Amen.
Dear Saints of God, Merry Christmas.
And may the Lord grant you that joy and that peace that comes from the incarnation of Jesus
in your flesh and blood, and the peace and the kindness that He gives to us.
These words that we’ve heard from John chapter 1 are some of the most sublime and wonderful
words that bring to us this mystery of how it is that God, the Son of God, can come down
into our flesh. He was, in the beginning, with God. He was God. All things were made
through Him. And yet this Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. We’ll spend our lives
considering this text and still we’ll get nowhere near the fullness of it. In fact,
I think we’ll meditate on this great mystery even into eternity.
Here’s the angle I want to come at it this morning with.
I saw a bumper sticker one time and it said simply this, three words, I hate people.
And as I was talking to someone about that this last week, they showed me a meme somewhere
and it said, I was a people person until, you know, people.
I was asking someone a few months back how things were going at work and they said it’s
great except for the customers and my co-workers and my boss, you know, the people.
In fact, I was talking to someone else about, and this is, I think, during the elections
and especially, you know, the last couple of years of all this kind of chaos surrounding
COVID and the pandemic, and they were telling me how it just seems like it’s harder to be
anywhere in the world to go grocery shopping or to be out and about. Everybody looks at
you suspiciously, and you wonder,
especially during the fights on the election.
This person was telling me that they wonder
if everybody is looking at them and hating them,
and they started to wonder if they were looking
at other people and hating them back.
I don’t know if it’s gotten worse.
It feels like it’s gotten worse.
Three or four of you told me that you kind of liked
the shutdowns because it meant that you didn’t have
to deal with anybody. And I think that there’s something about it. I mean if we’ve been practicing
what we call social distancing, then maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that people are
making us nervous. Now there’s a word for this, by the way. Misanthropy comes from two
Greek words, misos, which means hate, and anthropos, which means man, mankind. The hatred
of mankind. I looked it up, by the way, in my dictionary this morning to make sure that
I was pronouncing it right. And my dictionary, like almost all my books are used, and someone
had put a little checkmark next to the word misanthrope. And I thought, who had this
dictionary before I did? Misanthrope means a hater of humanity. Now, it doesn’t mean
I mean if you have this misanthropy, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have friends, it doesn’t
mean that you don’t love your family, I mean there’s specific individuals, certain parts
of humanity that are fine, but it’s, you know, people.
That’s the problem.
And this is a temptation for all of us.
Now I know that the world is full of fools, that the world is full of evil and violent
people, that the world is full of self-centered people, that the world is
full of sinners like you and like me. We’re part of this mess. How often have
you noticed this? How often are the things that we notice and despise in
other people precisely the same things that we despise in ourselves? And if you
haven’t noticed this, then it’ll be some time to meditate on the Lord’s law, to take that
mirror of the Ten Commandments and hold it up in front of yourself for a little bit. We
can recognize all the evil and all the trouble out there, but it is also in ourself. We,
after all, are, you know, people. But I’ll tell you, if anybody has reason to be misanthropic,
It’s God Himself.
Can you imagine talking with God a couple of days after He created the world and the
cosmos and just asking Him how things are going and He says, it’s great, I love creation,
the problem is, you know, the people.
They’re the ones that are giving me so much trouble.
They’re the ones that ate, I gave them every tree, every tree filled with fruit.
I even gave them a tree that they could eat the fruit from and live forever and instead they go to the one tree
I told them not to eat from and they ate it and now
Everything is dying even creation, which didn’t do anything wrong is subject to corruption
waiting for the redemption of the children of God
If anybody has reason to hate humanity
It is gone.
He sees it all.
Not only does he see the outward lawlessness and destruction, but the inward corruption
and the violence and the lust and the greed and the rebellion and everything else that’s
wrong not only with what we do, but with what we think and with what we say and with what
we feel.
Now, his wrath, make no mistake, his wrath is kindled against lawless deeds of every kind.
But God is no hater of humanity.
He is no misanthropist.
Now we know this, first of all, because he says it, because he gives his word of promise.
Because even after Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit in the garden, the Lord comes along and says,
not only does this mean that you have to die, but it means also that I will die.
And promise after page after page of the Old Testament,
father after patriarch after patriarch,
one after another, prophet after prophet,
the Lord is coming and promising that He will deliver His people,
that He will rescue them.
But then He keeps His promise.
And the Word becomes flesh
and dwells among us. Can you imagine it? God the Father, looking down on this
mess of corruption and hopeless humanity, and He loves us so much that He sends His
only begotten Son that whoever would believe in Him would not perish but have
eternal life. God the Son has such love for humanity that He becomes a man. He
He becomes a human being.
He becomes, you know, a person, your brother, your neighbor, to be your Savior and your
friend.
We sing it like this, love caused thy incarnation, love brought thee down to me, thy thirst for
my salvation procured my liberty.
Jesus does not hate you, He does not hate humanity, He loves you.
The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us.
And God, the Holy Spirit, so loves you
that He is pleased to dwell in you,
to call you His temple, to be with you,
to give you new life.
God, the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
is no misanthrope.
He is a philanthropist, that’s the other word,
a lover of humanity.
He is patient.
He is long-suffering.
He is not willing that any should perish,
but that all should come to everlasting life.
He, Jesus, is humbled, even to the point of death,
even to death on the cross,
so that we might be exalted and live with him forever.
That’s what he’s after.
Not to escape humanity, not to get away from humanity,
certainly not to destroy humanity,
but to have for himself a people
that will live with him forever.
That’s what Jesus wants.
Can you imagine it?
He will never go into isolation.
He will never quarantine himself.
He will always be with you,
even to the end of the age,
even past the end of the age,
even into eternal life and the resurrection.
It’s the point of it all.
This is the point. This is the main point.
This is the gospel point.
This is the point that you have to take away
this morning that Jesus does not hate humanity.
He loves humanity.
He does not despise people.
He loves people, and His incarnation proves it.
Can you imagine the honor that Jesus gives to you
and to every other person ever born on this planet,
ever conceived on this planet, every person ever to exist?
Jesus gives you this great honor of joining Himself
yourself, to your humanity, and being called your brother, because He loves you.
He does not despise you.
He is not disgusted with you.
He loves you.
The Incarnation proves it.
Jesus, bumper sticker, would say, I love people.
And he proves it not only in his birth, but also in his death, and his resurrection, and
his sacrament where he puts his body and blood into your mouth with the promise that your
sins are forgiven.
Now, dear saints, this matters for us.
If your Jesus loves people, then you are not authorized by him to hate humanity.
Here’s how Luther preached it.
This is me cheating by, I was reading the Luther quotes in the bulletin last night,
so I’m going to read one for you today.
Luther preaches this on Christmas.
He says,
as if we would rightly consider and take to heart,
we men ought to love and esteem each other heartily,
even if we had no gain from it.
For I do not yet speak of the use and benefit
of the gospel of the Christmas
when the angel speaks the following words to you
as born of Savior, but only of the honor of the incarnation,
the birth of Jesus.
Yes, if we would rightly take this to heart,
we could never be the enemy of any man.
For who would hate or harm that image that has a body and soul
like my God and yours?
Should we not, for the sake of this honor that God has shown us,
love all men and do good to them all?
Indeed, because how Jesus thinks of us changes how we think about each other.
The fact that Jesus was pleased to be born of the Virgin and to suffer on the cross means
that if God is for us, who could we be against?
So the joy of Christmas is, first of all, this, that God looks upon us with joy and
peace and love, and then by His Holy Spirit, He starts to give us that same joy and peace
and love in one another.
So dear saints, let us rejoice this Christmas day.
God is a lover of people, and you are a people.
So God the Son, God the Father, God the Holy Spirit,
loves you with a love that will carry you through all the troubles of this life
so that you will be with Him, so that He will be with you forever.
May God grant us this peace. Merry Christmas. Amen.
And the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Please stand.
