Christmas Eve Message
December 24th, 2006
Among my very favorite Christmas carols is “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.
Composed in 1865 by the Rev. Philip Brooks, an Episcopal Priest, following a visit to the Holy Land and first performed in 1868, it’s a five verse poem that captures a timeless sense of that long ago night we remember today. It’s prose is simple but elegant and the music simultaneously conveys a sense of reverence, joy, and longing.
“Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.
Yet in they dark streets shineth the everlasting light.
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”
And its that longing our Epistle speaks of today, the longing of those saints who lived, struggled, and sought God before the arrival of Christ motivated only by the promise of His coming. Some we know like righteous Simeon and Anna who spent their lives in holy reverence and were blessed in their old age to hold the young Christ in their arms. Others only saw the promise as something far away, something true and real but defined only as the hope that God would come to rescue His people and save the world. In types and shadows they received a foretaste of the gift to be given and carried on in faith. We read of these great men and women of faith in the Old Testament and marvel.
And their longing is ours as well.
There is still a kind of darkness to the world, a basic sort of brokenness, a senselessness to things that makes us shake our heads in a perverse kind of wonder. The Apostle Paul, writing in Romans, speaks of the creation groaning hoping for redemption, and we know in our own lives both the taste of beauty, grace, and light, that are the remnants of primeval Eden and the bitterness of existence broken by sin.
We long for hope, for something beyond ourselves, for certainty to cling to and a way back to our home. Even the most pleasant of life still has within it the seeds of exile, a kind of wandering, the realization of impermanence and the knowledge that although Eden’s gate is now closed and guarded by an angel the door of death is always open.
We differ from those saints of old not in the understanding of our human dilemma because they faced what we face. All the human eras have had a sense of yearning, a will to transcend, and a struggle with the abyss of death. We differ only in technology but not kind.
Yet while the dilemma, the need, the exile remains the same so too does the rest we seek, the salvation we crave, and the heaven for which we journey.
From the eyes of Abraham who left the security of life and home to wander the earth for the sake of God’s promise to the person sitting in an office in front of a computer, overwhelmed by work, by life, and the meaning of it all the hope is the same. From those who endured horrendous discomforts for the sake of faith to we who sit here in a kind of luxury that would have astounded even those who brought this church into being the answer to the hopes and fears of human history remains unchanged.
The man in the bar trying to drink his troubles away. The lady in her office with power and money to spare but a hollwness inside. The dreamers who write poems and the folks who travel from empty bed to empty bed in the hope of someone to love. The children who are afraid of the storms. Those who place their hope in other people only to be disappointed because we all have feet of clay sometimes. The hungry and oppressed of the world and those who starve and oppress others for the sake of their own dark hungers. The young girl looking at her face in the mirror and wondering what she sees and the old man looking at the ceiling of the hospital and gasping for that final bit of air.
All the hopes and fears of all the years are met in one moment when somewhere in the darkness of long ago Bethlehem a baby cried out in the night and angels and shepherds responded in worship and the world was destined to never be the same.
All that will be given tonight and tomorrow will fade away. That is the nature of earthly things. But if you will receive the gift that is given, this Christ who comes in such humble form, your hopes and fears and wandering and struggle will find a place of rest, if not always now then in that day to come.
December 24th, 2006
Among my very favorite Christmas carols is “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.
Composed in 1865 by the Rev. Philip Brooks, an Episcopal Priest, following a visit to the Holy Land and first performed in 1868, it’s a five verse poem that captures a timeless sense of that long ago night we remember today. It’s prose is simple but elegant and the music simultaneously conveys a sense of reverence, joy, and longing.
“Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.
Yet in they dark streets shineth the everlasting light.
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”
And its that longing our Epistle speaks of today, the longing of those saints who lived, struggled, and sought God before the arrival of Christ motivated only by the promise of His coming. Some we know like righteous Simeon and Anna who spent their lives in holy reverence and were blessed in their old age to hold the young Christ in their arms. Others only saw the promise as something far away, something true and real but defined only as the hope that God would come to rescue His people and save the world. In types and shadows they received a foretaste of the gift to be given and carried on in faith. We read of these great men and women of faith in the Old Testament and marvel.
And their longing is ours as well.
There is still a kind of darkness to the world, a basic sort of brokenness, a senselessness to things that makes us shake our heads in a perverse kind of wonder. The Apostle Paul, writing in Romans, speaks of the creation groaning hoping for redemption, and we know in our own lives both the taste of beauty, grace, and light, that are the remnants of primeval Eden and the bitterness of existence broken by sin.
We long for hope, for something beyond ourselves, for certainty to cling to and a way back to our home. Even the most pleasant of life still has within it the seeds of exile, a kind of wandering, the realization of impermanence and the knowledge that although Eden’s gate is now closed and guarded by an angel the door of death is always open.
We differ from those saints of old not in the understanding of our human dilemma because they faced what we face. All the human eras have had a sense of yearning, a will to transcend, and a struggle with the abyss of death. We differ only in technology but not kind.
Yet while the dilemma, the need, the exile remains the same so too does the rest we seek, the salvation we crave, and the heaven for which we journey.
From the eyes of Abraham who left the security of life and home to wander the earth for the sake of God’s promise to the person sitting in an office in front of a computer, overwhelmed by work, by life, and the meaning of it all the hope is the same. From those who endured horrendous discomforts for the sake of faith to we who sit here in a kind of luxury that would have astounded even those who brought this church into being the answer to the hopes and fears of human history remains unchanged.
The man in the bar trying to drink his troubles away. The lady in her office with power and money to spare but a hollwness inside. The dreamers who write poems and the folks who travel from empty bed to empty bed in the hope of someone to love. The children who are afraid of the storms. Those who place their hope in other people only to be disappointed because we all have feet of clay sometimes. The hungry and oppressed of the world and those who starve and oppress others for the sake of their own dark hungers. The young girl looking at her face in the mirror and wondering what she sees and the old man looking at the ceiling of the hospital and gasping for that final bit of air.
All the hopes and fears of all the years are met in one moment when somewhere in the darkness of long ago Bethlehem a baby cried out in the night and angels and shepherds responded in worship and the world was destined to never be the same.
All that will be given tonight and tomorrow will fade away. That is the nature of earthly things. But if you will receive the gift that is given, this Christ who comes in such humble form, your hopes and fears and wandering and struggle will find a place of rest, if not always now then in that day to come.
How silently, how silentlyThe wondrous gift is given !
So God imparts to human heartsThe blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming;But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still,The dear Christ enters in.
O holy Child of Bethlehem,Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in,Be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angelsThe great glad tidings tell,
O come to us, abide with us,Our Lord Emmanuel !
Amen.
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