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Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, welcome home. Welcome home to the house your father has given you, the house that your mother has made beautiful for you, the house where your father wishes to speak to you good news of great joy. Here is a feast that’s prepared for you for the family gathering. The feast prepared for you as God’s sons and daughters. The feast of the bread from heaven, Christ’s very flesh. The feast of the fruit of the vine, Christ’s very blood shed for you. And we show our unity in this mystery as we gather here. As we gather here as the Father’s beloved children, his sons and his daughters. We gather to hear the mystery of the Lord. A Lutheran Christian sermon. They sing glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill toward men. So there are no three shades of red. But notice how Emmanuel comes to be born. Emmanuel does not come to be born in a room that smells of Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder. He comes to a manger, a place where animals feed, not to a cradle. Not to a receiving table or a changing table, but to a manger. Where the smells of moist manure linger and the smell of hay permeates everything. There lies the swaddled creator of the universe wrapped in the very things of creation. Cloth, ah but more, flesh and blood just like yours. The kind if you pinch it, it hurts. The kind if you cut it, it bleeds. And the kind if you kill it, it dies, but rises again. It is not that God is slumming with us humanity, coming down, born in flesh and blood. It’s really more of not God being made small, but you as sons and daughters being made big, far more important than you are. You were conceived in sin and born of sinful parents and you are a sinner. And in Christ, you have been raised up from that life to something better. So this is not about God becoming man as much as it is you becoming a son or daughter of the Father. Jesus became what you are, a woman’s child, so that you might become what he is, a son of the Father. And a daughter of the Father. This is what God did. This is about the glorious nativity. Though it is only one small step for God, it is a giant leap for you, sons and daughters of the King. For you are made into something you were never to be without Him. A woman is pregnant with God within her. A woman is pregnant by God, the Holy Spirit. A woman will give birth… For no other reason, this God child, except for you and you alone. No aliens here, no other planet, just you, the crown jewel of his creation. Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, Jesus comes forth as the new and first man of a new creation, a new race. You who have been raised up, who by faith call God the creator. Amen. Father or daddy by faith. You don’t call him just God. You call him father or daddy. For you are his son and you are his daughter. His very flesh and blood is like yours. Remember what scripture says. For in the fullness of time he sent forth his son. Born of a woman. Born under the law. To redeem those under the law so that we might receive adoption as his sons and daughters. That’s what you need. Redemption and that’s what you need, adoption. You don’t need a God who strokes your ego with applause from on high on all the good things you’ve done. Building you a sinful self-esteem filled with nothing but yourself. Right? You do not need a God who’s a deadbeat deity so busy with the rest of the world’s creation and this universe that he has no care for when his children go astray. You do need a God for whom nothing matters more than to save you. You do need a God who wants nothing more than to adopt you as his flesh and blood because he shares your flesh and blood. You do need a God who cares so much about you to tell you the truth about you, his son and his daughter, to tell you, apart from me, you are depraved. You are, apart from me, dead. You are, apart from me, damned. But I love you, not because you’re lovable, beautiful or cute, Fulfilling some expectation of his, but because he is love incarnate in the flesh. He wants you, not because you make his family complete, not because he’s wanting a daughter like he never had or a son like he never had, but because he is your creator and redeemer and sanctifier. He desires you to be his child. Amen. More than any childless couple could desire their own flesh and blood, he who has taken on flesh and blood desires your flesh and blood, full of everything that you bring with it, full of your anxieties, full of your OCDs, full of your depression, full of all those things that you wish no one to notice about you. He wants it. He wants it all. That’s the God you need. And he’s done everything to make you his. Because this God-man, whose birth we’re celebrating this evening, whose connection to you and you to his by baptism, who has lifted you up, purifies your depravity, cleaning it up, making it pure once again, so that you don’t have to justify it with your own reason or strength. This God-man came to give life to all that this world stands to inherit, which is death. He is life in the flesh and he comes to bring it to you, having first given it to you in your baptism and feeding it to you now. This God-man brings salvation to everyone who is under the thumb of hell, which is everyone in this world. He frees you from that thumb that only Satan has to give you life. Eternal life with your flesh and blood to see your loved ones with their flesh and blood in heaven. He did not come to save the trees. He didn’t come to save the spotted owl. He didn’t come to rid the world of war or of hunger. But he did come to be for you that which you can never be. He came to be the perfect infant and child for you when you stretch the boundaries and push the limits with your parents. He came to be the perfect teenager who lived a chaste and decent life, honoring his father and his mother, loving others, did not think of himself only. He did what you cannot do by becoming the perfect adult. For every one of the things about which you have stressed and of which you have failed as an adult and have chosen a different path than what he has laid out, he comes to free you of that because he was perfect himself. In every way, until of course the Lord cried out from the cross, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Because that’s when he cleansed your flesh and blood and saved your soul, paying the price, which you will eat and drink, the reward that he won for you here. This is about you, sons and daughters, being lifted up and made big by God’s grace. This is about you being given a giant step and leap apart from the rest of this damned, dead, and dying world of which you and I exist in. You are set apart, different. That’s why you gather here. We have become infinitely more because of him. And you are going to eat him and drink him to the salvation and the forgiveness of your sins. Dear sons and daughters of the King, Merry Christmas to you. Merry Christmas indeed. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
